Sen 19455 A mujaheddin fighter once told me that fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives.

Sen 20045 If we pass through the heavily armed clans who would like to take what we have, we will deliver our goods to a unit of mujaheddin fighters who are putting siege to Kandahar city.

Sen 20404 We were setting out with him to commit a score of crimes across three international boundaries, and to interfere in a war between Afghanistan’s mujaheddin freedom fighters and the mighty Goliath of the Soviet Union.

Sen 20484 The heavy winter clothing, after a journey of thousands of kilometres through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, never reached the fighting men of the mujaheddin in the snowdraped mountains of Afghanistan.

Sen 20705 They should want us to smuggle stuff to the mujaheddin.

Sen 413 ‘Just it happens I have it one tola, ten grams, the best Afghan charras, in my pocket.

Sen 462 ‘Is good charras, yes?’

Sen 503 I say that this very best charras is one hundred rupees, not two.’

Sen 912 But now, Linbaba, with this money from selling your good present to Mr. Sanjay, I can buy two bottles of very bad and nicely cheap Indian whisky, to enjoy, and plenty of money left for one nice new shirt, red colour, one tola of good charras, tickets for enjoying air condition Hindi picture, and two days of foods.

Sen 973 ‘Well, now I am telling … that tola charras, the one I was selling to you in hotel …’

Sen 2445 ‘He says you are the first gora he ever met who can speak Marathi …

Sen 3370 ‘Gora kaun hain?’ the driver asked, when we climbed aboard the step.

Sen 5649 As we got out of the car I heard the cop say loudly, The gora speaks Hindi?

Sen 6321 ‘I have brought the gora to meet you.

Sen 10835 Perhaps the strangeness of the situation—a white man, a gora, pleading in Hindi for the lives of two black men—held them back from murder.

Sen 4601 He prepared the chillum, rocking from side to side and smiling absently.

Sen 4606 He finished preparing the chillum, and looked up at me.

Sen 4612 Then he held the chillum to his mouth, in the funnel of his hand, puffed it alight, and offered it to me.

Sen 5515 ‘Chillum bono,’ Khaderbhai said to Abdullah.

Sen 5516 Make a chillum.

Sen 3523 Smoking a beedie cigarette and sitting on the ox-bow yoke, his legs dangling free, was Prabaker’s father.

Sen 7910 She threw the finished beedie away, and took a step towards me.

Sen 8314 Karla fidgeted, tossed her beedie cigarette out of the open window, and rifled through the contents of her patent-leather shoulder bag.

Sen 10550 I lay back, in a darkness that smelt of incense and beedie cigarettes and cheap kerosene, and I sifted the events of the last few days through a sieve of doubt and suspicion.

Sen 11087 Prabaker went to buy three beedie cigarettes from Kumar’s shop counter, and lit them with the same match, holding them in one hand and burning the ends with the other.

Sen 3287 He lifted his shirt and singlet to display what was indeed a rough scratch and gathering bruise.

Sen 9298 He was wearing Puma sneakers, jeans, and a basketball singlet with the number 23 printed on the front.

Sen 11020 Appraising it with a suspicious squint, he slapped at the crate with a filthy rag and then tucked the cloth into his singlet.

Sen 11891 He wore a black singlet under the shirt, and the black hat was still hanging at his back.

Sen 12417 There, the rich men, like the rest of us, packed their nostrils with strips of cloth torn from a shirt or singlet, and clamped a lit beedie cigarette between their teeth to fight the smell.

Sen 5613 He has goondas, and those gangsters have made threats, and even done some beatings.

Sen 13419 ‘One of Khaderbhai’s goondas beat up a rich kid at a nightclub,’ he began, handing me a drink.

Sen 13633 His team of Indian goondas and Iranian veterans of the war with Iraq ensured that irregularities were rare, and ruthlessly punished.

Sen 20984 ‘Local goondas,’ I laughed.

Sen 20985 ‘Goondas,’ he repeated, laughing with me.

Sen 4081 One hundred and twelve numbers—one for every man in the village—were written on small pieces of paper, and mixed together in an empty clay water-pot, called a matka.

Sen 5413 On the sea wall, I felt the cool breeze wash across the skin of my face and chest like water poured from a clay matka.

Sen 7346 The water was stored in an earthenware matka.

Sen 11003 I stripped off my torn, bloody shirt, and poured a third of a bucket of clean water from the clay matka.

Sen 11373 I told him to throw out the water in his matka, wash it out thoroughly, and get fresh water.

Sen 593 This place is so good, they only have to pay the police half of usual baksheesh money.

Sen 1514 To baksheesh!’

Sen 2455 ‘Baksheesh, Lin.

Sen 5364 And, of course, anyone who could pay baksheesh was safe.

Sen 5703 Now they see such big baksheesh, more than a policeman like him is getting, and they will respect him a little.

Sen 3652 Under the indigo banner of early-evening sky, on the scratch of track between fields of undulant maize and millet, we spread out the colours of India, the yellows and reds and peacock blues of shirts and lungi wraps and saris.

Sen 3784 After the final rinse, and a quick dry off with the towel, he taught me how to tie a lungi around the wet shorts.

Sen 3785 The lungi was a sarong-like rectangle of cotton, worn from waist to ankle.

Sen 3786 He gathered two long ends or corners of the lungi at the front, and then passed them around my waist, and rolled them under the top edge, in the small of my back.

Sen 3787 Within the encircling lungi, I removed and discarded my wet shorts and slipped on a dry pair of shorts underneath.

Sen 3980 When we’d made our toilet, washed our faces, and cleaned our teeth, Rukhmabai stood over Prabaker and me while we ate a solid breakfast of roti and chai.

Sen 3981 The roti, or unleavened flatbreads, were made fresh for each breakfast, and cooked in a lightly oiled wok on an open fire.

Sen 3985 Trapped, our jaws grinding away at the admittedly delicious food, we both cast surreptitious glances at the young women cooking at the wok, hoping that each roti, after the third or fourth we’d eaten, would be our last.

Sen 3990 The meal usually consisted of the ubiquitous roti, spicy lentil dhal, mango chutney, and raw onions, served with lime juice.

Sen 4204 They were dressed in dhotis and white caps like the farmers in Prabaker’s village, and they sat on the floor to eat a hearty meal of dhal, rice, and roti.

Sen 4383 The black marketeers, who were Prabaker’s friends and contacts on the street, were happy that I’d brought new customers to them, and they paid me commissions as well.

Sen 4399 True, I’d inadvertently discovered a way to earn money as a middleman, a go-between, helping wary foreigners to deal with black marketeers.

Sen 11777 The rain had been heavy, and the flooding in many areas of the city was as hard on the touts, dealers, guides, acrobats, pimps, beggars, and black marketeers who made their living on the street as it was on the many businessmen whose shops were submerged.

Sen 11789 But the swiftest to the source, the sharpest-eyed of all the street people, were those of us who broke the law professionally: the black marketeers.

Sen 13658 The black marketeers were happy because a steady stream of dollars, Deutschmarks, riyals, and dirhams flowed into the river of demand created by Indian business travellers.

Sen 1221 The dark, brooding, undernourished young man was Modena, a dour and taciturn Spaniard who did black-market business with French, Italian, and African tourists.

Sen 8979 ‘Abdul has a pet theory, Lin,’ said Khaled, the dour Palestinian.

Sen 9119 Keki was dour and unresponsive, and Rajubhai seemed to be suspicious of me, almost to the point of rudeness.

Sen 15028 ‘Touch wood,’ Scorpio added, his dour frown already focusing on the troubles the evening might bring.

Sen 18095 The point man for Maurizio’s operation in Bombay was the diffident, dour Spaniard, Sebastian Modena.

Sen 5487 ‘You are the doctor in the Colaba hutments, Mr. Lin.

Sen 5489 It is unusual, a foreigner, living in the hutments.

Sen 5494 The slum where I lived, known as the zhopadpatti, or the hutments, half a square kilometre, with twenty-five thousand men, women, and children, belonged to him?

Sen 5500 Doctors will not go into the hutments willingly.

Sen 6168 ‘He is the doctor in the Colaba hutments.’

Sen 4263 I thought he was about to admit defeat, but at last he gasped and spluttered his way through to empty the glass.

Sen 13322 ‘Am ek?’ he spluttered, through the laugh.

Sen 17547 ‘I’m just glad it wasn’t an advert for laxatives or some such!’ he spluttered, causing me to laugh and spray tea at him in return.

Sen 22006 ‘Don’t get me started again!’ Khaled spluttered, laughing and clutching at his side.

Sen 22486 ‘I’m out of line!’ I spluttered, feeling my teeth chatter, and struggling to make my numb limbs obey my mind.

Sen 9346 Ameer winced and grimaced inventively, but he didn’t cry out.

Sen 9938 He winced, but I didn’t relax the grip.

Sen 12467 ‘Oooooh!’ he winced, pursing his lips.

Sen 12477 ‘Oooooh!’ he winced again, hunching his shoulders.

Sen 13255 That face wrinkled and winced as he stared at me.

Sen 555 The haphazard slouch of neglected tenements crumbled into lavish displays of market vegetables and silks.

Sen 2280 Stone facades, which had once been splendid and impressive, were crumbling, grimed, and patched with haphazard necessity.

Sen 2477 The ground was paved with haphazard collections of tiles that had once been the floors of kitchens and bathrooms.

Sen 4193 The furniture was shoddy and thrown together in haphazard combinations, however, and the carpet in the corridors had worn through to shaggy holes in many places.

Sen 6234 When Abdullah took us into the plaited traffic once more, his bike weaving a haphazard progress through the threads of buses, cars, trucks, bicycles, bullock wagons, and pedestrians, he called over his shoulder to tell me that Doctor Hamid had once lived in a slum himself.

Sen 964 Ha means yes, and nahin means no, and pani means water, and khanna means foods, and —’

Sen 6747 ‘Pani nahin,’ Qasim said.

Sen 7044 ‘Takleef nahin!’ one of the bear-handlers called out.

Sen 9251 ‘Nahin, baba!’

Sen 14108 ‘Riot nahin, morcha hain.’ It’s not a riot, it’s a demonstration.

Sen 6818 Come on, take this stick of yours, and beat a man with it, you cheap goonda.’

Sen 7647 ‘It’s the name of a thief, a goonda.

Sen 9255 He’s a cheeky fellow, a goonda.

Sen 18644 I walked the goonda walk, and in three languages I talked the talk.

Sen 18700 When I approached Chandra Mehta for help in organising the dancers, two weeks before Prabaker’s wedding, he’d assumed that the Prabaker in question was an important goonda working for Khaderbhai.

Sen 1187 Ek coffee aur.

Sen 12999 ‘Aur dass!’ he screamed.

Sen 26225 ‘Saatch aur Himmat.’ I spoke it aloud for them.

Sen 27661 ‘Saatch … aur himmat,’ he said, looking each man in the eye.

Sen 27663 ‘Saatch aur himmat,’ they replied.

Sen 4949 By the yellow flickering lamplight we tended to the wounded slum-dwellers, using my first-aid kit as the basis of our little open-air clinic.

Sen 5404 I found books on diagnostic medicine, and studied them by lamplight in my hut.

Sen 9151 As I turned into the last gully where my own empty hut waited, I saw lamplight.

Sen 18666 A cotton sheet strung across the doorway was just sheer enough in the golden lamplight to reveal thrillingly indistinct shadows, inflaming fierce desires in many of those who crowded outside, where I stood guard and kept the curious at bay.

Sen 25128 I remembered reading Didier’s letter and deciding, in that shifting, yellow lamplight, that I would kill Madame Zhou.

Sen 7871 She took a bundle of beedies from her pocket and lit two of them with a cigarette lighter, holding the small cigarettes in one hand and playing the flame over them with the other.

Sen 8226 ‘I don’t think anyone knows.’ She took out two beedies, lit them, and gave me one.

Sen 20883 I took two beedies from a pack, lit them in my hand with the play of a match, and handed one to him.

Sen 22201 Instead, I lit two beedies, and passed one to him.

Sen 22262 I lit two more beedies, not for the need of them, but for the distraction they provided, and their little warmth.

Sen 2326 I tried to help the man to stand, but there was an elderly woman who squatted on her haunches there, in the open doorway, and she slapped at my hands, warning me away.

Sen 3582 As we loaded our gear and climbed into the back of the cart, Kishan took his seat on the yoke attached to the ox-bow, raised a long bamboo stick that had a nail driven into the end of it, and moved us off with a tremendous blow to the animal’s haunches.

Sen 4961 I blinked, and squinted, and realised that he was squatting on his haunches, with his elbows on his knees, and his face cupped in his hands.

Sen 9796 Nazeer squatted on his haunches to smoke with us.

Sen 12532 It took four hours, shuffling forward and squatting on our haunches, and they left me till last.

Sen 2170 They shouted instructions to the crowd, and in moments a wooden cart appeared, pushed by bare-chested men wearing only singlets and short lungis.

Sen 4576 Workmen, wearing faded lungis, stood beside men in traditional dress from various regions of India.

Sen 6907 After they’d scrubbed themselves clean with a hot bucket-bath, and dressed in new lungis and clean, white singlets, the two boys stood before an assembly of their families, friends, and neighbours.

Sen 8088 I’ve got one pair of boots, one pair of jeans, one shirt, two T-shirts, and a couple of lungis.

Sen 9675 In my hut there were only two lungis, which I wore for sleeping, bathing, or for when I washed my jeans.

Sen 2163 He was a round-shouldered man, in his middle forties, wearing a grey, cotton safari suit that had been tailored to accommodate the extravagant boast of his large paunch.

Sen 3524 Kishan Mango Kharre was a tiny man, shorter even than Prabaker, with very close-cropped grey hair, a short, grey moustache, and a prominent paunch on his otherwise slender frame.

Sen 3565 He still held the shirt up to his chest, exposing the round, hairy paunch.

Sen 4802 He smiled happily and shook my hand, rubbing vigorously at his prominent paunch all the while.

Sen 9441 He was a tall man with a prominent paunch and a large, expressively bristly moustache, tinged with grey.

Sen 12225 Now get in the fucking jeep, you sisterfucker, or we’ll beat you with the lathis, and then put you in.’

Sen 12364 Next room, sisterfucker!

Sen 18858 You’re speaking like a regular Bombay sisterfucker.

Sen 20087 Go, sisterfucker!

Sen 26738 ‘Hey white sisterfucker, can’t you see the taxi’s empty?

Sen 3789 After the shower, and a delicious meal of dhal, rice, and homemade flatbreads, Prabaker and I watched as his parents and his two sisters opened their presents.

Sen 3990 The meal usually consisted of the ubiquitous roti, spicy lentil dhal, mango chutney, and raw onions, served with lime juice.

Sen 4204 They were dressed in dhotis and white caps like the farmers in Prabaker’s village, and they sat on the floor to eat a hearty meal of dhal, rice, and roti.

Sen 6892 Joseph was given rice and dhal.

Sen 11992 We ate chicken byriani, malai kofta, vegetable korma, rice, curried vegetables, deep fried pieces of pumpkin, potato, onion, and cauliflower, hot buttered naan bread, dhal, papadams, and green mango chutney.

Sen 410 I can get it one tola, one kilo, ten kilos, even I know where it is a full warehouse …’

Sen 413 ‘Just it happens I have it one tola, ten grams, the best Afghan charras, in my pocket.

Sen 912 But now, Linbaba, with this money from selling your good present to Mr. Sanjay, I can buy two bottles of very bad and nicely cheap Indian whisky, to enjoy, and plenty of money left for one nice new shirt, red colour, one tola of good charras, tickets for enjoying air condition Hindi picture, and two days of foods.

Sen 973 ‘Well, now I am telling … that tola charras, the one I was selling to you in hotel …’

Sen 976 The really price—the friendship price—is only fifty rupees for one tola Afghani charras.’ He lifted his arms, and then let them slap down at his thighs.

Sen 10763 A piece of shinbone on one leg protruded below the knee.

Sen 12672 As we approached, a prisoner opened a valve at the base of the tank, allowing a small jet of water to escape from a pipe that protruded at about shin-height.

Sen 20642 In a few moments the similarity dissolved: Mahmoud’s eyes protruded a little, his lips were less full, and his chin was pointed, as if it was designed to hold a goatee beard.

Sen 21887 One bone protruded at a sickeningly unnatural angle, but it remained within the envelope of flesh, and nowhere pierced the skin.

Sen 22823 One thick chunk of bone protruded from the lumpy meat.

Sen 6716 When the rough, home-brewed alcohol, known as daru, was produced, he instructed Prabaker and Jeetendra to force Joseph to drink.

Sen 6720 He gulped down more of the extremely powerful daru and then tried to push it away, saying that he’d had enough.

Sen 6822 He shouted for water, but they offered him only the daru bottle.

Sen 6826 Daru spilled over his stubbled chin, and ran from his gaping mouth.

Sen 6872 You will not drink even one drop of daru or beer or anything but water.

Sen 3260 In the carriage and the corridor beyond, the other passengers were similarly respectful, sharing, and solicitous with one another.

Sen 7695 ‘Sorry for problem, Miss Karla,’ Prabaker apologised, his face pinched in a solicitous frown.

Sen 10717 Tariq embraced him in a solicitous hug, and their close friendship was sealed.

Sen 11400 With that call to arms from Johnny Cigar, and the simple, solicitous gesture from Sita, the battle began.

Sen 20192 In the weeks that followed he became solicitous and even tender-hearted toward me.

Sen 4238 I stared at him in bewilderment.

Sen 7039 The bewilderment and obvious reluctance on my face drove the people to more and bigger laughter.

Sen 9893 A minute later we were outside, on the street beside the Nabila Mosque, boy and man joined tightly at the hand but in nothing else except our bewilderment at the power of the personality that had pushed us together against our wills.

Sen 13315 The two men raised their palms, and exchanged identical expressions of bewilderment.

Sen 19282 ‘What?’ I asked, looking at him with a frown that was angry in its bewilderment.

Sen 5767 Khaderbhai also took a sugar cube and sipped his tea through it, endowing the little custom with a peculiar dignity and solemnity, as in fact he did with every expression and even the most casual gesture.

Sen 5945 He said it with such solemnity, despite the smile, that I had to laugh.

Sen 9624 ‘A man …’ he began, intoning the words with sacramental solemnity.

Sen 18719 He leapt to his feet and danced a few pumps of his hip-thrusting sexy dance before the solemnity of the occasion overwhelmed him once more, and he sat down with his bride.

Sen 20420 The irony was that we were, in fact, similarly dour and serious men, but his grim severity was so stark that it roused me from my own solemnity, and provoked a childish, prankish desire to mock him.

Sen 1188 Jaldi karo!’

Sen 2072 ‘Band karo!’ Prabaker shouted.

Sen 11896 Arre, full karo!’

Sen 15212 Band karo!

Sen 15214 Band karo!’ Now, now!

Sen 1252 The whisky arrived, in four small flasks, and the waiter prised the tops off two soda bottles with a brass bottle opener that hung from a chain at his belt.

Sen 9891 Tariq clung to him, grabbing his hair, and had to be prised from the embrace with some force.

Sen 10155 I placed the ashtray under it and prised it loose, letting it fall from her hand into the bowl.

Sen 12814 Holding the ribbed seam at the neck, he prised it apart and revealed the sheppesh crawling in the crease at the seam.

Sen 18172 She gently prised the glass from Ulla’s fingers, and gave her a cigarette.

Sen 3316 The man beamed a smile at me so huge that it was half the brilliance of Prabaker’s own, and set to such energetic head waggling in return that I was, at first, a little alarmed.

Sen 3360 By the time the bus rolled out of the busy terminal, I was accepting smiles and head-wiggles from every man in sight, and waggling and wiggling at them in return.

Sen 3551 His eyes glittered as he spoke to me, waggling his head all the while in what seemed to be an unnervingly seductive leer.

Sen 4455 ‘No, no, Lin,’ Prabaker declined, waggling his head.

Sen 8663 The taxi driver greeted them, waggling his head happily.

Sen 1175 ‘You didn’t hear a word we said,’ she chided.

Sen 2143 ‘Looks like you were wrong, Prabu,’ I chided, smiling as I lit a cigarette for him.

Sen 2664 ‘Your sympathy should be for me,’ Ulla chided.

Sen 8079 ‘Hey come on!’ she chided, curling her lip in an affable smirk.

Sen 8842 ‘Come now, Lin,’ Abdul Ghani chided.

Sen 3525 He wore the white cap, cotton kurtah shirt, and dhoti of the farmer caste.

Sen 3526 The dhoti is technically described as a loincloth, but the term robs the garment of its serene and graceful elegance.

Sen 3528 The dhoti itself is always moving, and it follows the human contour in every act from running to sitting still.

Sen 3531 Gandhi gave the dhoti prominence on his trips to Europe, in the struggle for Indian independence from England.

Sen 24123 A short, fat, balding man in a white singlet and dhoti opened the door and thrust out his hands at once in a double handshake.

Sen 5921 He hobbled away as the singers returned to the stage.

Sen 6227 Abdullah and I left him, and waited for twenty minutes in the restaurant, watching through a large window as poor patients hobbled to the entrance of the hospital, and rich patients were delivered in taxis and private cars.

Sen 6429 A stern, almost severe expression burned in his eyes, while the lepers hobbled forward, one by one, and tapped their leathery stumps or the blackened, curled claws of their fingernails to my feet.

Sen 6599 They clasped their arms around one another, and hobbled away on three legs.

Sen 13709 That innocence faltered when I stumbled from the Indian prison: my smile, no less than my footsteps, hobbled by the memory of the leg-irons.

Sen 21434 With our senses alert for menace from without and within, we travelled by night, and sometimes by day, north along the mountainous border towards Pathaan Khel.

Sen 21435 Near the khel, or village, we swung north-north-west into deserted mountainous terrain that was veined with cold, fresh, sweet-water streams.

Sen 21437 We trudged between Pathaan Khel and Khairo Thaana; between Humai Khaarez and Haji Aagha Muhammad.

Sen 21534 When all the tributes were exacted—Hajji Mohammed drove a hard bargain, demanding and receiving Khader’s own horse as an additional, personal gift—Khaderbhai, Nazeer, and I agreed to accompany the leader to his khel.

Sen 21540 As Khader, Nazeer, and I rode away from the temporary camp toward the khel, the sounds of singing and laughter followed us, echo chasing playful echo.

Sen 4605 The rapid outward rushes of air sounded like wavelets on a steep shore.

Sen 11238 THE ROCKY CUSP OF COASTLINE bordering the slum began in mangrove swamp, at its left, and swept through deeper water around a long new-moon curve of white-crested wavelets to Nariman Point.

Sen 15334 Her hips rolled and swayed in time to the running wavelets that lapped at her feet.

Sen 25581 Tourist ferries bound for the caves on Elephanta Island, or returning to shore, rose up the wavelets and rolled over them in proud, practised glissades.

Sen 27914 When the call finally went out for us to gather at Haji Ali, I rode to the shrine on my Enfield bike, and walked with Abdullah and Mahmoud Melbaaf across the rippling wavelets of the bay.

Sen 5377 They were armed only with the thin bamboo cane known as the lathi.

Sen 5381 And although they struck out often with the lathi, savage or even serious beatings were rare—much less frequent than police beatings in the modern, western city where I’d grown up.

Sen 12652 Suddenly there was a stabbing pain at my ear as the night watch overseer swung his bamboo lathi against my head.

Sen 12890 A snakeskin pattern of lathi bruises covered their bare arms and legs.

Sen 12932 With all the stealth that malice manufactures, even in the gross and clumsy, Rahul crept up behind me and brought his lathi down on my left upper arm with bone-rattling force.

Sen 12225 Now get in the fucking jeep, you sisterfucker, or we’ll beat you with the lathis, and then put you in.’

Sen 12259 Five or six men hit my spinning body as hard and as often as they could, cracking their cane lathis against my skin.

Sen 13028 They hammered at me with the bamboo lathis for twenty minutes or more.

Sen 14235 All I could hear was the lathis ripping into me.’

Sen 27130 And two of those Wildlife-wallahs, two watchmen on duty, they got very upset about all the crying, so they went outside, and they started beating Kano’s blue men with lathis.

Sen 15029 ‘Should do all right out of it,’ Gemini said cheerily.

Sen 20473 The war in Afghanistan, most of them conjectured cheerily, had a few good years left in it.

Sen 24818 ‘She’s great, yaar,’ he responded cheerily, taking a seat.

Sen 25386 ‘We must be a bit early,’ Salman observed cheerily, and I flinched as I forced myself into the moment with him.

Sen 26386 ‘So how about a bite to eat then?’ Gemini suggested cheerily.

Sen 10501 Then, his body rigid with the vehemence of his rage and courage, the little boy shrieked, seized a lump of wood, and crashed it down on the snout of the black dog.

Sen 14340 His eyes were dark, almost black, and gleaming with the vehemence of his wilful induration.

Sen 18987 ‘See my eviction from their point of view,’ Mehta retorted, with such vehemence that several heads turned toward him from other tables.

Sen 22284 It was the closest he ever came to showing anger in my presence, and I flinched involuntarily at the sudden vehemence.

Sen 27617 I wasn’t sure if it was at the vehemence of my tone or the blunt simplicity of the Hindi phrase.

Sen 3838 Her life enfolded mine within its triumph and sorrow, just as easily as her red shawl sometimes enswathed a crying child that passed the doorway of her house.

Sen 5074 And some time during the course of that love-song, somewhere in the landscape of the slum-dwellers’ reassurances, somehow through the fact of our survival, their world enfolded my life within its dreams, as gently and completely as a swollen tide closes over a stone that stands upon its shore.

Sen 5401 Strange and troubled as my life was, the city enfolded it within the millions of others as if … as if it belonged there, no less than any other.

Sen 26689 Sometimes, we see the past so clearly, and read the legend of its parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose, and a kind of message is enfolded in it.

Sen 28504 And then I knew what it was, that emptiness: there’s a name for it, a word we use often, without realising the universe of peace that’s enfolded in it.

Sen 6550 Iqbal held impromptu classes every afternoon for a week in the main room of his father’s hut, and the crowd spilled out into the forecourt to share in his precious knowledge.

Sen 19417 No-one in the forecourt of the mosque or the street of shops could tell me when he’d left, or when he might return.

Sen 19700 I suddenly remembered the day in the rain, sailing in a canoe across the flooded forecourt of the Taj Mahal Hotel and beneath the booming, resonant dome of the Gateway Monument.

Sen 20750 I was still thinking of that first night, still worried by the questions I couldn’t answer, when Khaled and I came upon a large group of men, hundreds of them, sitting cross-legged on the tiles of a wide forecourt adjacent to the mosque.

Sen 25770 Once through the glass doors, I walked down the marble steps and across the wide forecourt of the Gateway Monument to the sea.

Sen 7320 ‘Nobody’s perfect, as Didier would say,’ she drawled, with a smirk that fluttered just short of a smile.

Sen 10025 ‘Assuming you can handle it,’ I drawled, grinning in spite of myself, ‘what’s in it for me?’

Sen 11527 ‘Those charm school lessons are paying off, I see,’ she drawled, sounding very American.

Sen 27474 ‘I’m sure, Salman,’ Amir drawled, running his hand over the short, grey hair on his blunt head.

Sen 28256 ‘The second best?’ she drawled.

Sen 9759 He looked at me with benign, almost affectionate condescension.

Sen 12719 His broad expression, a parody of amused condescension, was infuriating.

Sen 17581 That style was two parts showman, two parts flatterer, and one part philanderer, combined with a hint of mischief, a sniff of condescension, and a pinch of contempt.

Sen 20292 The horses watched us with that peculiarly equine mix of white-eyed timorousness and snorting condescension.

Sen 20415 He saw the condescension behind my smile, even if he didn’t understand the full meaning of the words.

Sen 4099 The almost submerged stick was his, and he accepted, with shy laughter and downcast eyes, the good-natured jeers of his friends and the sneers of the older men.

Sen 10817 The mob, swayed by my eloquent courage, would wander away from the scene with shamed and downcast eyes.

Sen 20938 His expression was sombre, and it seemed as if the spirit was draining invisibly from his downcast eyes as he spoke.

Sen 22301 He seemed satisfied with my reply, but his expression was downcast and almost grim.

Sen 27089 ‘No,’ he murmured, his eyes still downcast.

Sen 105 As the kilometres wound past, as the hundreds of people in those slums became thousands, and tens of thousands, my spirit writhed.

Sen 995 Beneath my windows the street that had writhed and toiled in daylight was silent, subdued by a night-sultriness, moist with stars.

Sen 11510 While she’d writhed and thrashed on a damp earth floor, I’d been calling down to room service to order more ice-cream and crepes.

Sen 12159 Our tongues writhed, and slithered in their caves of pleasure.

Sen 20047 Questions writhed in my shivering mind, hundreds of them, but the cold turkey was crippling me.

Sen 5744 At some of the tables there were hookah pipes, pearling the air with blue smoke, and the perfume of charras.

Sen 8878 Farid rose and placed a huge, ornate hookah, with six snaking lines, on the floor between us next to the table.

Sen 8879 He passed the smoking tubes out, and squatted next to the hookah with several matches held ready to strike.

Sen 8892 ‘Now, Mr. Lin,’ Khaderbhai said, smiling graciously as Farid removed the hookah and set about cleaning the ash-filled bowl.

Sen 9031 The sense of well-being bestowed by Khaderbhai’s benignant smile was as intoxicating as the heady mixture we’d smoked in the hookah pipe.

Sen 2642 Lettie wore a fine, bone-coloured brocade jacket over loose, dark-brown satin culottes, and boots.

Sen 8562 For a moment I looked at the marks, the curved indentations that her knees had made in the brocade cushion beside me on the floor.

Sen 8726 I kicked off my shoes at the doorway, where several other pairs of sandals and shoes had been discarded, and sat down on the plush, brocade cushion he’d indicated.

Sen 13071 He was dressed in pyjamas and a silk brocade dressing gown.

Sen 18729 Vikram wore a three-quarter-length black coat, a black-and-white brocade vest, black gaucho pants with silver piping, and his beloved hat.

Sen 3990 The meal usually consisted of the ubiquitous roti, spicy lentil dhal, mango chutney, and raw onions, served with lime juice.

Sen 5051 A stool found its way into my hut, and a water pot—the ubiquitous matka—and a set of saucepans, and a few pieces of cutlery.

Sen 7284 I attended to them one by one—rat bites, fever, infected rashes, ringworm—chatting with each, and catching up on the gossip that constantly swirled through the lanes and gullies like the ubiquitous dust-devils.

Sen 8062 We were in a Bumblebee, one of the ubiquitous black-and-yellow Fiat taxis, travelling south through the Steel Bazaar.

Sen 24567 The wall I’d fallen through appeared to be as solid as all the others, but it was merely a plywood screen papered over with her ubiquitous Compton pattern.

Sen 17511 Johnny and a dozen or so of his neighbours were erecting the frame for a shamiana, or great tent, where the wedding ceremonies would take place.

Sen 22008 A canvas shamiana in camouflage colours provided shelter for our wounded men.

Sen 22087 When Khader completed his prayers, we carried Siddiqi’s body back to the canvas shamiana, and wrapped it in cloth until the rituals of burial could be performed on the following day.

Sen 25441 We climbed the white marble steps at the Taj, and walked through to the Shamiana Restaurant on the ground floor.

Sen 1586 And now everyone, all the poor who were chandu smokers, they have become garad smokers.

Sen 1587 Rafiq controls the garad, the brown sugar.

Sen 26120 He’s making crores out of the fuckin’ garad, man.

Sen 27978 And Faisal and Amir, they’re running the garad.

Sen 2038 What is baingan masala?

Sen 2041 What is it, you’re not enjoying eating baingan?’

Sen 2043 Baingan is good eating, too!’

Sen 2044 ‘I don’t like it baingan so much,’ he sneered, wrinkling up his short nose.

Sen 1380 Indian prostitutes, garlanded with ropes of jasmine flowers and plumply wrapped in bejewelled saris, were prohibited downstairs, and only accompanied customers to the upstairs bar.

Sen 2291 The women were more conspicuously bejewelled, despite the indigence of the quarter, and what those jewels lacked in money’s worth was found in the extravagance of their design.

Sen 2489 All of them stared out at the well-fed, well-clothed purchasers and agents, following every change of expression or emphatic gesture of their bejewelled hands.

Sen 20657 The spectacular canopy was a hundred paces across, and bejewelled with tiny, polished mirrors.

Sen 2421 ‘Ah, ah, maza nao Lin ahey,’ I muttered, uncertainly.

Sen 2426 ‘Maza Desh New Zealand ahey.

Sen 2427 Ata me Colabala rahella ahey.’ My country is New Zealand.

Sen 3372 ‘Maza mitra ahey,’ Prabaker answered with contrived nonchalance, trying in vain to disguise his pride.

Sen 3370 ‘Gora kaun hain?’ the driver asked, when we climbed aboard the step.

Sen 27727 ‘Gora kaun hai?’ the new man asked.

Sen 27734 ‘Kaun hai turn?’ he asked in an almost friendly tone.

Sen 27752 ‘Kaun hai turn?’ the big man asked again.

Sen 2697 She wore a long-sleeved Indian salwar top that reached to below her knees, where it met loose trousers in the same olive silk fabric.

Sen 11519 She wore a salwar kameez—the most flattering garment in the world, after the sari—in two shades of sea green.

Sen 19544 She was wearing a red salwar kameez.

Sen 28091 She was wearing a long, salwar top over loose pants.

Sen 5926 The musicians accompanying the singers on the harmonium and the tablas were animated, but the singers themselves were expressionless, motionless, with their eyes closed and their hands limp.

Sen 16256 Sitting together, they cradled tablas, cymbals, flutes, and tambourines in their laps.

Sen 16298 Their voices soared over the blood-stirring thump of the tablas and the wail of the flutes.

Sen 20793 The Blind Singers cleared their throats noisily, and the assembly of musicians began the introduction to a new song with the plaintive wail of the harmonium and the blood-stirring passion of the tablas.

Sen 11221 That look, that frowning smile, combined shame and exultation because both are essential—shame gives exultation its purpose, and exultation gives shame its reward.

Sen 11221 That look, that frowning smile, combined shame and exultation because both are essential—shame gives exultation its purpose, and exultation gives shame its reward.

Sen 11221 That look, that frowning smile, combined shame and exultation because both are essential—shame gives exultation its purpose, and exultation gives shame its reward.

Sen 11222 We’d saved him as much by joining in his exultation as we had by witnessing his shame.

Sen 13024 His slack-lipped, cretinous puzzlement made me laugh the harder.

Sen 14020 ‘You really think so?’ he asked, frowning his puzzlement.

Sen 19587 ‘That’s right!’ she answered wonderingly her face frowning and smiling in puzzlement.

Sen 27988 ‘That’s not the apology, Lin,’ he explained, frowning in puzzlement.

Sen 6506 He smiled back at me, reflexively and in an instant of unusual clarity I saw that, for him, I was the one who inspired something of that confidence: as Abdullah was to me, so was I to Prabaker.

Sen 9987 A patch of her blonde pubic hair was visible, and I glimpsed reflexively over my shoulder to make sure that the boy couldn’t see into the room.

Sen 12738 He turned on his heel, and struck out reflexively at the nearest man crouching in the ranks.

Sen 18473 Thinking of Prabaker’s mighty smile always made me smile reflexively, as if I was looking at a happy, healthy baby.

Sen 26225 ‘Saatch aur Himmat.’ I spoke it aloud for them.

Sen 27661 ‘Saatch … aur himmat,’ he said, looking each man in the eye.

Sen 27663 ‘Saatch aur himmat,’ they replied.

Sen 28078 ‘Saatch aur himmat,’ Abdullah called out as I rode past him.

Sen 2029 Now tell me, what is alu palak?’

Sen 2030 ‘Alu palak is potato and spinach.’

Sen 2033 I love to eat it, alu palak.

Sen 7623 A team of women scooped out servings of saffron rice, alu palak, kheema, bhajee, and other foods.

Sen 2029 Now tell me, what is alu palak?’

Sen 2030 ‘Alu palak is potato and spinach.’

Sen 2033 I love to eat it, alu palak.

Sen 7623 A team of women scooped out servings of saffron rice, alu palak, kheema, bhajee, and other foods.

Sen 11252 Sunlight suddenly pushed aside the sodden monsoon clouds, and for a few moments the windows of the apartment buildings across the bay were dazzling, brilliant mirrors of the golden sun.

Sen 11507 That celebration seemed vain and stupid as I hurried through the sodden lanes to the scores who were sick.

Sen 21829 When the knife left her throat, the blood gushed in heart-thrusted bursts onto her chest and the sodden ground.

Sen 22109 Snow fell in fitful gusts and squalls that left us sodden in our many-layered patchwork uniforms.

Sen 8761 Sobhan wagged his grizzled, grey head at me in greeting, fixing me with a look of steely enquiry, perhaps to make sure that I understood the honour implied in the use of first names.

Sen 9041 ‘You do not share our joy at the speaking of English, Sobhan Uncle,’ Khaderbhai said, addressing the tough, grizzled older man on his right.

Sen 25465 They were the new blood, the new mafia dons, the new lords of the city: Sanjay, the efficient killer with the movie-star looks; Andrew, the genial Goan who dreamed of taking his seat on the mafia council; Amir, the grizzled veteran with the story-teller’s gift; Faisal, the cold-hearted enforcer who only asked one question—Finger, arm, leg, or neck?—when he was given an assignment; Farid, known as the Fixer, who solved problems with fire and fear, and who’d raised six much younger brothers and sisters, alone, when his parents died in a cholera-infested slum; and Salman, the quiet one, the humble one, the natural leader, who controlled the lives of hundreds in the little empire that he’d inherited and held by force.

Sen 27308 The elderly sculptor raised his grizzled brows when we entered his hut, but affected to ignore us and continued with the work of sanding and polishing a newly moulded section of a fibreglass religious frieze almost two metres in length.

Sen 312 Each one of them seized a bag, suitcase, or backpack and trudged off, leading his party into the flak-traffic with brisk determination.

Sen 3465 We’d passed countless fields of maize and banana groves in the last hour of the bus ride, and then on foot we trudged along the dirt road between endless rows of millet plants.

Sen 21437 We trudged between Pathaan Khel and Khairo Thaana; between Humai Khaarez and Haji Aagha Muhammad.

Sen 22935 The horse trudged through the snow for a day and half a night before it crumpled, collapsed, and died almost three kilometres from our camp.

Sen 11206 Stumbling and tottering on his platform shoes, he skipped to the centre of the dancers.

Sen 12847 Not a few men, shuffling uncertainly on thin, tottering legs, talked a twitching madness to themselves, and stumbled into the walls until we turned them gently and set them on a new course.

Sen 20333 When he tried to speak English, the words came out in awkward, truncated couplets, top-heavy with meanings and tottering on small feet of blunt sense.

Sen 24027 I tried to walk, but my wounded shins refused to obey me, and the best I could manage was a tottering shuffle.

Sen 1221 The dark, brooding, undernourished young man was Modena, a dour and taciturn Spaniard who did black-market business with French, Italian, and African tourists.

Sen 14936 He accepted my taciturn mood, and we worked through the strenuous exercise-routine in silence.

Sen 18169 Modena, tougher than anyone knew and taciturn to the end, refused to tell him that Ulla was hiding in an adjoining room, only footsteps away, with all the money.

Sen 26558 Modena had been one of the most taciturn men I’d ever known.

Sen 6230 Hamid was a good doctor, and when, after an hour of discussion, I looked into his prematurely lined face, the eyes burned and reddened by lack of sleep, I felt shamed by his honest exhaustion.

Sen 8839 Although I had nothing whatsoever to do with Sapna and knew almost nothing about him, my face reddened with that special guilty blush of the completely innocent man.

Sen 26660 And as his eyes reddened and simmered into tears that ran, exactly, in the channelling scars that pierced his cheeks I held the stare, and nodded my head, and said nothing at all.

Sen 28075 He looked up quickly, and the warmth that reddened his eyes vied with a grim warning clamped in the bad-luck horseshoe of his mouth.

Sen 2129 I reached out to the driver, trying to prise him from the obstructing rim of the steering wheel, but Prabaker’s hands were on me again, brutally rough.

Sen 16377 It took me five minutes to calm him down, and even then I had to invent a mission for him —checking for the Africans at the hotels he knew well—in order to prise him from my side.

Sen 20281 He climbed down, and began to prise my boots from the stirrups.

Sen 22603 I tried to prise the gun free with my left hand, but all my fingers were so cramped that I gave it up.

Sen 3869 She smiled back at him, despite herself, and felt a rush of well-being, an indefinable but overwhelmingly sanguine cheerfulness.

Sen 12099 And I did like Ulla: she was beautiful, and she was just naive enough, just sanguine enough to stop sympathy slipping into pity.

Sen 14051 Even the hard-nosed taxi lords weren’t immune to his sanguine charm.

Sen 16038 It was a genial, sanguine meeting, and I rose to leave with the strength and confidence that those honest, simple, decent men always inspired in me.

Sen 3878 Judicious investments in the enterprises of her neighbours and a careful husbanding of their resources ensured that their losses were few.

Sen 5239 Everything, from judicious caution to superstitious terror, screamed at me not to go out there again.

Sen 20453 The army secretly supported extremists from the rival groups with weapons, money, and the judicious application of favours.

Sen 22886 In all his deliberations, the Palestinian was intense and tireless and judicious, to the point of being solemn.

Sen 11234 As the music dwindled to an echo in our minds, the day-to-day and minute-to-minute of slum life slowly reclaimed the lanes.

Sen 11505 The treatment queue that had begun with hundreds, nine months before, had finally dwindled to none.

Sen 12603 And the attack, which had begun with frenzied violence, dwindled to fewer blows as I walked the gauntlet.

Sen 18494 And the music dwindled with the distance until it was as faint and diminishable as any moment of truth.

Sen 1190 In defiance of the humid climate, he always wore baggy canvas trousers, a denim shirt, and a rumpled, grey woollen sports coat.

Sen 7086 Mixed with it was a smell like new leather shoes, and the smell of a child’s woollen blanket.

Sen 10034 I removed it, and covered him with a light woollen shawl that was hanging from a set of hooks.

Sen 27669 ‘Nothing,’ he breathed, his voice like the rustle of a woollen blanket.

Sen 5390 A six-lane road separated the seaside path from a horizon-wide, incurving crescent of affluence: fine homes, expensive apartments, consular offices, first-class restaurants, and hotels that looked out over the black and heaving sea.

Sen 8174 They declared that Gilbert Parker was a consular under-secretary at the embassy of the United States of America.

Sen 17448 But they couldn’t obtain the visas legally, and false visas were impracticable because they were immediately checked against the consular register.

Sen 20818 Madame Zhou had punished me for defying her, for daring to challenge her, for impersonating an American consular officer, for taking Lisa Carter away from her and, yes, perhaps for loving Karla.

Sen 672 He leaned forward and took up a length of smouldering hemp rope that was hanging from a hook on the telegraph pole, next to the cigarette stall.

Sen 4929 A woman from the team was carrying a baby they’d rescued from the smouldering rubble.

Sen 11096 Parvati watched us from the corners of her smouldering eyes.

Sen 22189 Reassured, perhaps, that I was listening to him, he looked back to the smouldering horizon, and spoke again.

Sen 1315 The quiet Spaniard left the table without a word, and walked toward the open archway that led to the street.

Sen 9917 Frustrated and wavering, I hesitated at the large, open archway of the mosque.

Sen 12302 They helped me into the archway of the first open cell-room, and eased me to the concrete floor.

Sen 12556 He pointed toward an archway that led into the prison’s interior.

Sen 20207 Two falls later, as I climbed wearily into the saddle, I heard a familiar voice.

Sen 20877 ‘Reading is still something mysterious, in the country of my birth, and the cause of some fear and much superstition,’ Khader said wearily, rubbing a hand over his tired, brown face.

Sen 21168 ‘There is no man who knows these mountains, and the region between here and Kandahar, better than Habib,’ Khader concluded, sighing wearily.

Sen 21967 Nazeer led several horses forward, and we climbed wearily into the saddles.

Sen 13146 The many hundreds of small and large cuts that I’d sustained on the day and the night of the beating caused me agonising pain.

Sen 21975 The cramp quickly became a piercing knot of pain; and the more that I tried to ignore it, the more agonising it felt.

Sen 23093 One of the agonising truths for a battle medic is that you pray as hard and almost as often for men to die as you pray for them to live.

Sen 27816 He’d missed the killing blow, a direct hit, but it was still enough to make me curl and roll over in agonising pain.

Sen 311 Prabaker gestured with his upturned palm to those touts and guides who’d managed to secure customers from among the tourists.

Sen 3542 Prabaker and his father had the same almost perfectly round face and the same upturned, button nose.

Sen 12872 Sitting in circles of twelve or more men, and tapping on their upturned aluminium plates as if they were tabla drums, the prisoners sang love songs from their favourite movies.

Sen 16466 They leapt over the upturned bed and fell on him, stomping and kicking him until he stopped moving.

Sen 6117 ‘No, Linbaba, not about that,’ he rasped, in a scratchy whisper.

Sen 8000 ‘What the fuck ever happened to good, old, meaningless sex, without any strings attached?’ she rasped, her lips drawn tightly over her teeth.

Sen 8433 Her voice rasped the word across our skin.

Sen 22738 ‘It should have been donkeys,’ he rasped.

Sen 7449 Prabaker and I laughed, and the vaguely suspicious furrows in her brow deepened.

Sen 8906 Deep suspicions were planted in the furrows of his frown.

Sen 17000 From all its major restaurants, bars, and a hundred other windows, the Sea Rock scanned the endlessly shifting peaks and furrows of the Arabian Sea.

Sen 22898 Seven lines and ridges like planter’s furrows creased his broad, high brow.

Sen 58 The various Indian officials assumed that I was travelling with that relaxed and guileless group, and gave me no more than a cursory check.

Sen 6394 No-one gave it more than a cursory glance.

Sen 17450 As a gora, a well-dressed foreigner of European appearance, I was never subjected to anything but a cursory examination.

Sen 19442 My interactions with most of them had been cursory, it seemed to me, and yet I missed the reassurance of their presence in the city almost as much as I missed the company of my dead friends.

Sen 545 Every kind of illness, disability, and hardship paraded there, stood at the doorways of restaurants and shops, or approached people on the street with professionally plaintive cries.

Sen 12116 The taxi pulled away, and she called out with a plaintive urgency that seemed harsh and almost hysterical in the stillness of the night.

Sen 13895 I ordered for Didier, and let my thoughts wander while we listened to the plaintive screech of the radio announcer.

Sen 20793 The Blind Singers cleared their throats noisily, and the assembly of musicians began the introduction to a new song with the plaintive wail of the harmonium and the blood-stirring passion of the tablas.

Sen 59 I pushed through alone to the slap and sting of sunlight outside the airport, intoxicated with the exhilaration of escape: another wall scaled, another border crossed, another day and night to run and hide.

Sen 15861 The heart-squeezing, enlivening exhilaration of it was so powerful that it wasn’t until an hour later, when we entered Abdul Ghani’s passport workshop, that I could give my full attention to the man and the moment that we shared.

Sen 21068 That, too, was a night of wheeling fears and exhilaration and dread.

Sen 23339 It was the exhilaration of men who were risking everything, risking life and death, on one throw of the dice.

Sen 8093 I fidgeted with the prickly collar of the shirt.

Sen 8314 Karla fidgeted, tossed her beedie cigarette out of the open window, and rifled through the contents of her patent-leather shoulder bag.

Sen 24399 Every time I accelerated away, he dragged his feet on the road and fidgeted for several seconds until he found the footrests.

Sen 26482 ‘I’m sorry for running away,’ he said quietly, his eyes fixed on his hands as they fidgeted in his lap.

Sen 2552 He leaned slightly forward and inclined his head to one side, his black curly hair shaking as if to emphasise the points in his explanation.

Sen 4882 ‘I hate these fucking fires!’ Johnny cursed, slamming downward with a wet sack to emphasise his words.

Sen 21705 ‘Remember,’ Khader said insistently, resting his hand on my forearm to emphasise his words.

Sen 24941 ‘I’m not sure he wanted that from the start,’ Salman Mustaan interrupted, shaking his head at his close friend to emphasise his point.

Sen 1378 Leopold’s was an unofficial free zone, scrupulously ignored by the otherwise efficient officers of the Colaba police station, directly across the busy street.

Sen 2297 The buildings were cracked and smeared, the constricted passage-ways were crowded with goats, chickens, dogs, and people, and each thin face showed the shade and hollows of penury, but the streets and the people were stainlessly, scrupulously clean.

Sen 22913 Face to face, Afghan men were generous, friendly, honest, and scrupulously courteous to me.

Sen 27186 But they hadn’t lived in those miraculous acres, and they hadn’t learned that to survive in such a writhe of hope and sorrow the people had to be scrupulously and heartbreakingly honest.

Sen 2393 The fine dagger-line of his moustache accentuated his scowl, and he looked at me with such undiluted loathing that a little prayer unfurled itself in my mind.

Sen 17146 And the whole, improbably coherent expression of love and life, drama and comedy, was articulated in the delicate, unfurled elegance of a graceful hand, or the wink of a seductive eye.

Sen 19373 In the hut he’d once shared with Parvati, Prabaker’s mother, Rukhmabai, unfurled her thigh-length hair.

Sen 21476 It was the perfect place for an ambush and, in anticipation, Khader rode at the head of our column with his green-and-white banner unfurled.

Sen 21231 He put his left foot in his stirrup and swung into the saddle with an effortless spring.

Sen 21255 I put my foot in the stirrup and sprang off with my right foot.

Sen 21976 Attempting to relieve the stress on my hip, I took my right foot out of the stirrup and tried to stretch my leg.

Sen 21978 Without warning, my left foot gave way beneath me as my boot slipped from the stirrup, and I felt myself falling sideways out of the saddle toward the deep, hard drop to the stones.

Sen 3271 And in truth, the politeness and consideration shown by the peasant farmers, travelling salesmen, itinerant workers, and returning sons and fathers and husbands did make for an agreeable journey, despite the cramped conditions and relentlessly increasing heat.

Sen 5360 Lunatics, eccentrics, and itinerant entertainers such as musicians, acrobats, jugglers, actors, and snake charmers were occasionally roughed up, but they were invariably excluded from the round-up.

Sen 7466 Many of the tradesmen were itinerant workers who followed where their skills were needed, and whose real homes were hundreds of kilometres away in other states.

Sen 27291 For a moment I felt a thrill of wonder and envy that the little community of neighbours and friends worried so much about the problems of two itinerant bear-handlers—and the bear, of course.

Sen 11046 ‘Et bien, she began by detesting him but, through the persistence of his devoted romantic attentions, he has managed to arouse in her what I can only describe as an amiable revulsion.’

Sen 12426 I’d been raised in a family of Fabian socialists, and I’d inherited their stubborn, impractical revulsion for social iniquity in all its forms.

Sen 18314 And was there something else in her eyes: was it revulsion, or was it more terrible than that?

Sen 22583 He stood his ground a moment more, and I could feel the urge to take the gun out and shoot him: an urge that was drowning me in cold, shivering waves of revulsion and rage.

Sen 4071 Then, with Prabaker leading the way, the crowd of villagers goaded, dragged, and pushed me toward the river.

Sen 10466 The wild howling goaded the most maddened of them to make a series of rushing feints from several directions.

Sen 21712 Even the right things that I did were too often goaded by the wrong reasons.

Sen 21855 The gleam in his eyes goaded me for another heartbeat of vexation and I almost shouted at him, but then I saw the warmth in his expression, and the concern.

Sen 4596 The Baba standing before us was tall and lean, but his legs were so thickly swollen that dreadful ropes of distended veins throbbed on their surfaces.

Sen 5052 As evening throbbed in a scarlet arch of sky, we sat in a group, near my hut, to eat and talk.

Sen 11552 I did need help, not just with the physical work of nursing the people, but also with the doubt and fear and shame that throbbed in my throat and chest.

Sen 23868 Another fierce pain throbbed at my forehead.

Sen 100 Nothing in the enormous sprawl of it rose much above the height of a man.

Sen 6279 The elastic tolerance of slum-dwellers—who accommodated every caste and race and condition of person within their sprawl of huts—rarely extended to lepers.

Sen 7478 The sprawl of fragile huts spread outward like a shallow, tender root-system for the huge towers that were to come.

Sen 26092 And the informing rate in the areas of his control, the amount of unsolicited information supplied to the police—a sure indicator of public popularity or displeasure—was lower than in any other area across the whole seething sprawl of Bombay.

Sen 17624 ‘The movie’s called Paanch Paapi,’ she said.

Sen 17627 paapi, not papi.

Sen 17629 Paapi means thief, and papi means kiss.

Sen 6995 They were speaking in Hindi, and I was unfamiliar with the word vachan, meaning promise.

Sen 6998 Several people were repeating the Hindi word vachan.

Sen 7013 But there is a vachan, a promise, before they will give it the message.

Sen 21485 Although the two-humped Bactrian camel is native to Afghanistan, the rider’s was a single-humped Arabian camel; the type bred by long distance cameleers of the northern Tajik region for use in extremes of cold.

Sen 21567 That group of Afghan nomads, cameleers, sheep and goat herders, farmers, and guerrilla fighters lent credibility to the idea, for they snored so thunderously and with such persistent ferocity through the long, cold night that they would’ve frightened a pride of ravenous lions into scattering like startled mice.

Sen 23168 Juma’s Tajik clans of cameleers were traditional rivals of the Mohmand Hazarbuz people of Hanif and Jalalaad in the nomadic transport of trade goods.

Sen 15297 He insisted that we finish the meal with a long glass of the locally brewed coconut feni, and followed that with an equally long glass of cashew feni.

Sen 15297 He insisted that we finish the meal with a long glass of the locally brewed coconut feni, and followed that with an equally long glass of cashew feni.

Sen 15311 There was a bottle of coconut feni on the table, with two glasses.

Sen 6113 We took a few steps, but Johnny Cigar came after us and tugged at my shirtsleeve, pulling me a pace or two behind Abdullah.

Sen 27606 Pushing between us, he seized Andrew by the wrist and a scruff of shirtsleeve.

Sen 28602 At that moment I felt a tug at my shirtsleeve and I turned my head to see what seemed to be the ghost of a gigantic smile with a very small man attached to it.

Sen 20789 Yes, with a cap to cover your white hair, and a pattu, a shawl, to throw over your broad shoulders and chest.

Sen 23655 Habib’s pattu shawl was rucked up around his chest.

Sen 23992 ‘Oh yes, yes, he pull his Kalashnikov out from under his pattu and point it at them.

Sen 16084 I was about to make very loud noises in a plate of Leopold’s pulao.

Sen 16102 ‘Well, nobody told me anything about it,’ I complained, still thinking of the delicious pulao at Leopold’s.

Sen 21569 Those dishes included flavoured yoghurts, piquant goat’s or sheep’s milk cheeses, oven-baked cakes made with corn flour, dates, nuts, and wild honey, biscuits baked with richly churned goat’s milk butter and, of course, a variety of halal meats and vegetable pulao.

Sen 128 He stretched, yawned, and scratched unselfconsciously at his naked belly.

Sen 7368 He stood close to Karla, staring unselfconsciously.

Sen 13132 Within a few days, I walked that rolling, shambling dance as unselfconsciously as they did.

Sen 6516 With my help, they bought four kilos of charras and two thousand Mandrax tablets.

Sen 13055 ‘Your mandrax tablets, sir,’ the guard said.

Sen 16500 They were muscle: hit men, sent by a gangster in Lagos to punish me for a major heroin and Mandrax tablet deal that had gone wrong.

Sen 12529 And one day they came to take our fingerprints, pressing the black, traitorous loops and whorls onto a page that promised to tell a truth, a vile truth, and nothing but that truth.

Sen 26457 The skin, when it closed together, had fused in jagged whorls at the sides but not at all in the centre, where the laceration was too deep.

Sen 27310 Wood and fibreglass shavings covered the table and lay in chips and whorls, along with rinds of papier-måché, at his bare feet.

Sen 12740 Breakfast consisted of a single, large chapatti.

Sen 12849 The evening meal, served at four-thirty with the addition of a single chapatti, was a repetition of that soup of the day.

Sen 13141 I was living on a palm-sized piece of chapatti bread and one saucer of watery soup every day.

Sen 25087 ‘Fuckin’ gandu,’ Sanjay growled, using the slang word for arsehole.

Sen 26134 ‘If it comes to that, I’ll kill the gandu for you, brother, and it will be my pleasure.

Sen 26252 Gandu!’ Sanjay shouted.

Sen 20620 Those longbeards were out of their minds at the way the Russians were changing the country—letting women work, and go to university, and get around in public without the full burkha covering.

Sen 27174 ‘A burkha.’

Sen 27190 The blue-grey burkha covered the standing bear from its head to the ground.

Sen 2846 He placed a hand on Karla’s shoulder, and turned to the rest of us with a brilliant smile of affability and charm.

Sen 10683 Then a door opened behind us, and Ghani’s round face dissolved into its usual mask of facetious affability.

Sen 20558 We shook hands, sizing one another up with equal candour and affability.

Sen 8536 There was terrible anguish written in the rivulets of those tears and the torment that creased her face.

Sen 11487 Because so much rainwater had accumulated in puddles and rivulets throughout the slum, those too had provided breeding grounds for the bacteria.

Sen 12171 Sweat ran in rivulets to ravines of pleasure.

Sen 1861 She smiled, wrinkling her nose in a quizzical expression that might’ve been scornful or pleased.

Sen 11048 Didier and I inspected him with quizzical looks of our own.

Sen 17108 I raised one eyebrow unconsciously in a quizzical expression.

Sen 102 My first impression was that some catastrophe had taken place, and that the slums were refugee camps for the shambling survivors.

Sen 13132 Within a few days, I walked that rolling, shambling dance as unselfconsciously as they did.

Sen 21096 After the first few shambling steps, his body twitched into a more efficient mode, and he began to lope, covering the thirty metres that separated us in long, crouching, feline strides.

Sen 2170 They shouted instructions to the crowd, and in moments a wooden cart appeared, pushed by bare-chested men wearing only singlets and short lungis.

Sen 6907 After they’d scrubbed themselves clean with a hot bucket-bath, and dressed in new lungis and clean, white singlets, the two boys stood before an assembly of their families, friends, and neighbours.

Sen 14617 Three fishermen dressed in lungis and singlets approached us shyly.

Sen 3867 It was radiant, and suffused with an irrepressible good humour.

Sen 12179 The still and softly breathing silence that suffused and submerged us, afterward, was emptied of need, and want, and hunger, and pain, and everything else except the pure, ineffable exquisiteness of love.

Sen 21715 I remembered Anand’s face smiling at me through the metal grille of the visitor’s room at Arthur Road Prison: that gentle, handsome face, so serene, and softened with the peace that had suffused his heart.

Sen 4268 Hindi love songs jingled beside heart-breaking gazals.

Sen 5792 ‘Urdu is the language of gazals, and these are the best gazal singers in all Bombay,’ he replied.

Sen 20533 A large portable radio was playing romantic gazals in Urdu.

Sen 18633 Their conversation came to me in laughing gasps and shrieks as they scandalised one another with gossip and sardonic commentaries on the peculiar habits of their neighbours’ husbands.

Sen 18705 Some of the thousands of neighbours and guests at the slum wedding were pleasantly scandalised, but most were delighted by the wickedness—Prabaker and Johnny first among them.

Sen 23299 Although they’d been scandalised by my admissions about being a gunaa, or sinner, and being imprisoned as a criminal, they’d been thrilled by the account, and asked many questions afterwards.

Sen 10277 Some of them were culled from various novels and other texts, each one attributed to the respective author and annotated with her own comments and criticisms.

Sen 10342 The pages were dog-eared, and heavily annotated in Karla’s own hand.

Sen 20870 And so it was that I rode during the day, acclimatising myself to the thinner air above five thousand feet, and at night read the diaries and journals of long-dead explorers, extinct editions of Greek classics, eccentrically annotated volumes of Shakespeare, and a dizzyingly passionate terza rima translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

Sen 21916 He had a special talent for herding the unruly goats, and I’d often seen the temperamental creatures following him, unbidden, as he wandered around our camp.

Sen 22614 A clear thought came to me, unbidden, and surging in my mind like the spoken words of a poem.

Sen 23305 The words, like some kind of desperate prayer, came unbidden from my heart.

Sen 321 He spoke with deferential amiability to the two Canadians.

Sen 1452 He lifted his plump, jovial face above the heads of his friends and swept the room from right to left, acknowledging deferential nods and friendly smiles from a number of acquaintances at other tables.

Sen 3262 It seemed hypocritical for them to show such deferential concern over a nudge with a foot when, minutes before, they’d all but pushed one another out of the windows.

Sen 14862 Someone had daubed the name Sapna on a grubby wall nearby.

Sen 15823 The name Sapna was daubed on the walls with his own blood.

Sen 24595 The daubed cheeks were higher than the bones beneath them.

Sen 2421 ‘Ah, ah, maza nao Lin ahey,’ I muttered, uncertainly.

Sen 2426 ‘Maza Desh New Zealand ahey.

Sen 3372 ‘Maza mitra ahey,’ Prabaker answered with contrived nonchalance, trying in vain to disguise his pride.

Sen 940 He glanced at me, his cheeks appled in the impish grin I was learning to recognise as the clever under-side of his broad and gentle smile.

Sen 3847 A wide gap between her front teeth gave an impish mischief to her smile, while the superb hook of her beaked nose endowed her serious expressions with an imposing authority.

Sen 11049 He responded with an impish smile, but I noticed that his eyes darted away quickly to his left.

Sen 539 Men with bullock wagons and handcarts wound their way through heavy traffic to deliver watermelons and sacks of rice, soft drinks and racks of clothes, cigarettes and blocks of ice.

Sen 8064 Hundreds of wooden handcarts, longer and taller and wider than a car when fully laden, trundled along between buses and trucks, pushed by barefoot porters, six men to each cart.

Sen 14578 Nearer to the docks we threaded our way through crowds of men pushing handcarts, and women carrying baskets on their heads, all bearing crushed ice and a burden of fish.

Sen 20092 Chief among them is the endorphin group.

Sen 20094 Anxiety and stress and pain bring on the endorphin response as a natural coping mechanism.

Sen 20096 When we stop taking opiates, there’s a lag of between five and fourteen days before the body begins a new endorphin production cycle.

Sen 5899 ‘Perhaps five,’ he replied, accepting the change of topic with tolerant equanimity.

Sen 6488 I knew that a part of whatever equanimity I’d managed to display, perhaps most of it, had really been his.

Sen 28601 Beings of such lambent compassion, such sublime equanimity, that in my broken, exiled heart I pledged to love them, as every man and woman who saw them did.

Sen 7764 She raised one eyebrow in the familiar, sardonic half-smile.

Sen 18633 Their conversation came to me in laughing gasps and shrieks as they scandalised one another with gossip and sardonic commentaries on the peculiar habits of their neighbours’ husbands.

Sen 26868 Their excitement, enthusiasm, ambition, and limitless hope for the future so delighted everyone in the Leopold’s crowd that Kavita and Didier felt obliged to respond, occasionally, with sardonic sniping.

Sen 3276 However, when I surrendered my seat, for four hours of the journey, to an elderly man with a shock of white hair and spectacles as thick as the lenses on an army scout’s binoculars, Prabaker was provoked to an indignant exasperation.

Sen 4068 ‘Are you all crazy?’ I shouted, in exasperation.

Sen 13102 The official examined his gold wristwatch for a moment, and then sighed his exasperation loudly.

Sen 2121 Suddenly, he clambered over the seat into the front of the car and wrestled the passenger door open.

Sen 5307 I clambered over the bluestone parapet, and took hold of the cord.

Sen 16253 I jogged along beside the train, and clambered up the outside of the carriage to the roof.

Sen 2206 His arms were splayed out at right angles to his body and held fast.

Sen 9552 He sat with his broad back against a wall, and his lower legs splayed out in front of him.

Sen 12764 His legs were splayed out at an excruciatingly unnatural angle.

Sen 7618 Straw and hessian was strewn about to serve as bedding for the goats, chickens, cats, and dogs that foraged amid discarded food scraps and rubbish in the pen.

Sen 8047 One said she possessed a fortune in precious gems that she kept in a hessian sack, another talked with authority about her addiction to various drugs, and a third whispered of satanic rites and cannibalism.

Sen 18814 Rat-catchers patrolled the corridors, dragging conspicuous hessian sacks that bulged with writhing, fat animals.

Sen 2066 From time to time he opened his door and leaned out over the road to spit paan juice, taking his eyes off the traffic ahead for long seconds as we hurtled along in the rattling cab.

Sen 18920 ‘The hotel!’ the passenger repeated, and the yellow Exocet hurtled back along the winding roads once more.

Sen 19158 We hurtled through the ponderously slow traffic, riding on luck and instinct just as Abdullah might’ve done.

Sen 6700 His hair was dishevelled, and blood stained his face.

Sen 11018 True to the general rule of slum life that the more money one made, the more poverty-stricken one had to look, Kumar’s appearance was more dishevelled and ragged than the meanest of his customers.

Sen 12009 She was distraught and dishevelled.

Sen 18934 Its piano bar, for example, was a small masterpiece of light and cleverly private spaces, and its brasserie vied determinedly for the title of the best restaurant in Bombay.

Sen 18935 Walking into the dark, richly textured brasserie from the brilliant day, I paused and blinked until my eyes found Lisa and her group.

Sen 19151 I held open the door of the brasserie for Lisa, and looked back at the table.

Sen 2058 The taxi driver—a burly, dark-skinned man with a bristling moustache—seemed to be outraged at my impertinence in saving our lives.

Sen 9802 The first of them consisted of his eyebrows, which began a little above and in the centre of his eyes, and descended with bristling unruliness along the slope of his frown to the level of the eyes themselves.

Sen 10024 We stared across the kind of bristling hostility that’s sometimes as good as, or better than, mutual attraction.

Sen 9902 Just as we passed the main entrance to the mosque, the muezzin began to recite the call to prayer from the minarets above our heads.

Sen 9910 He pointed at the entrance to the mosque, and then to the tower above it, where loudspeakers amplified the voice of the muezzin.

Sen 20661 It was some time since the evening prayer—I’d heard the call of the muezzin while we were driving in the cab—but there were still many men absorbed in private prayer throughout the mosque.

Sen 7563 To my western eyes, those fluid, feminine figures in soft red, blue, green, and yellow silk were incongruous in the physical turmoil of the construction site.

Sen 21661 There was always something eerily incongruous in the wise lectures—sometimes they were like sermons—of the mafia don Abdel Khader Khan.

Sen 25328 Lettie had once said that she found it strange and incongruous to hear me describe criminals, killers, and mafiosi as men of honour.

Sen 179 ‘Safer?’ I asked, assuming a nonchalance I didn’t feel.

Sen 3372 ‘Maza mitra ahey,’ Prabaker answered with contrived nonchalance, trying in vain to disguise his pride.

Sen 23016 Then it hovered with arrogant, fearless nonchalance near the edge of the plateau that had been our haven.

Sen 4290 My left hook and overhand right elbow, the best hard punches in any street fight, were lucky, and both made tough contact.

Sen 12947 I followed him, pushing him on to the back foot and hitting him with a flurry of jabs and overhand rights.

Sen 19826 When I judged the moment to be right, I swung round at him with an overhand right.

Sen 5657 In the moonlight, the teardrop arches and rounded contours glowed white and became the sails of that mystic ship, and the minarets were so many towering spars.

Sen 9902 Just as we passed the main entrance to the mosque, the muezzin began to recite the call to prayer from the minarets above our heads.

Sen 12593 I was walking into the worst of the city, one of her cruellest and most iniquitous defiles, but some instinct flooded my mind with a loveliness I’d found in her—that path, across the sea, to the white minarets of the saint’s tomb.

Sen 11396 He warned her that her sister’s life was in her hands, and he admonished her for her cowardice.

Sen 16751 ‘You know,’ I admonished him, ‘Karla says that depression only happens to people who don’t know how to be sad.’

Sen 28606 ‘Shantaram!’ he admonished me when I started speaking to him in Hindi.

Sen 21472 More than a few of the tough, hardened fighters, trudging between the walking horses, stooped to gather a little clutch of flowers so that they might simply feel the beauty of them in their dry and calloused hands.

Sen 21730 Stupidly, I didn’t associate it with gunfire at first, and I kept trudging forward, leading my horse by the reins.

Sen 22157 Trudging through the light snow I dug out new latrines, and carefully covered them over and concealed them again when they were full.

Sen 316 The pack was heavy, forcing him to thrust his neck out, lean over, and launch himself forward into a trundling gait.

Sen 6293 Even the rolling stock were ghost trains, trundling from shunting stop to shunting stop without staff or passengers.

Sen 27307 With Kano trundling along on all fours beside us, we made our way through the darkening lanes to the large double-hut that was old Rakeshbaba’s workshop.

Sen 2178 As the semi-conscious woman was trundled away on the humble cart, the man hurled himself at the door of the taxi, wrenching it open.

Sen 8064 Hundreds of wooden handcarts, longer and taller and wider than a car when fully laden, trundled along between buses and trucks, pushed by barefoot porters, six men to each cart.

Sen 27197 The blue-grey, burkha-clad figure trundled forward, all the while emitting a low, grumbling moan.

Sen 11992 We ate chicken byriani, malai kofta, vegetable korma, rice, curried vegetables, deep fried pieces of pumpkin, potato, onion, and cauliflower, hot buttered naan bread, dhal, papadams, and green mango chutney.

Sen 21462 Many were the days we passed with no more than one glass of water to drink, and one small piece of naan bread to eat.

Sen 22160 When it was my turn to milk the goats, I churned the milk into butter and helped to cook naan bread.

Sen 8173 The cards were made of pearl-white, textured, linen paper, and the words were embossed in liquid black italic.

Sen 21454 And for the clan leaders there was a small hoard of gold tablets, each weighing one tola, or about ten grams, and embossed with the Afghan laurel.

Sen 25664 Her lips, embossed with secret thoughts, were swollen to the truth she was trying to tell me.

Sen 3322 A range of products, from pottery to clothing to handwoven tatami mats, was arriving at the station for dispatch to the cities.

Sen 3700 We passed through a low arch, and he led me to an area beside the house that was enclosed on three sides by hanging tatami mats.

Sen 3722 He was darting about, peering through the tatami matting at various places.

Sen 11408 His hair was unkempt, and he pushed it back frequently with the long fingers of his right hand.

Sen 15023 They were unshaven, unwashed, and unkempt in appearance.

Sen 20634 Beyond the window the streets grew less ordered, and the buildings grew more shabby and unkempt.

Sen 16038 It was a genial, sanguine meeting, and I rose to leave with the strength and confidence that those honest, simple, decent men always inspired in me.

Sen 25356 Andrew had been genial and talkative, but he’d moved only reluctantly from the company of his young gangster friends, and we hadn’t become close.

Sen 25465 They were the new blood, the new mafia dons, the new lords of the city: Sanjay, the efficient killer with the movie-star looks; Andrew, the genial Goan who dreamed of taking his seat on the mafia council; Amir, the grizzled veteran with the story-teller’s gift; Faisal, the cold-hearted enforcer who only asked one question—Finger, arm, leg, or neck?—when he was given an assignment; Farid, known as the Fixer, who solved problems with fire and fear, and who’d raised six much younger brothers and sisters, alone, when his parents died in a cholera-infested slum; and Salman, the quiet one, the humble one, the natural leader, who controlled the lives of hundreds in the little empire that he’d inherited and held by force.

Sen 10601 A few moments later, he shook himself from his reverie and looked at me, his eyes gleaming in a gentle, affectionate smile.

Sen 15262 She drifted in that reverie for a few moments and then snapped her head back to stare at me.

Sen 24283 He dropped his gaze again, and lapsed into a reverie so rich in thought and feeling that his head twitched and his lower lip trembled in the turbulence of it.

Sen 20175 The white gelding and grey mare were large, docile animals.

Sen 20184 The thickset Afghan cupped his hands to boost me onto the gelding’s back, nodding his head for me to climb up, and winking encouragingly.

Sen 20187 The gelding galloped away down the beach without me.

Sen 964 Ha means yes, and nahin means no, and pani means water, and khanna means foods, and —’

Sen 6747 ‘Pani nahin,’ Qasim said.

Sen 8502 I took a glass and drank some of the nimbu pani.

Sen 14737 ‘I’m … happy to stay with the metre right now,’ I demurred, laughing again in spite of myself.

Sen 17027 ‘Fuck lunch, let’s get stoned first, yaar,’ Kalpana demurred.

Sen 28014 ‘I don’t know, man,’ I demurred, grinning in surprise at his earnestness.

Sen 229 The impression was of a plodding, indefatigable, and distant past that had crashed intact, through barriers of time, into its own future.

Sen 3604 The people smiled, laughed, wiggled their heads in return, and ran ahead, shouting to their neighbours about the entertaining spectacle that was plodding along the track towards them.

Sen 21981 I called on it to stop, but it ignored me, plodding onward along the narrow track.

Sen 11524 Her lips were like the soft ridges of dunes in the desert at sunset; like the crests of waves meeting in the frothy rush to shore; like the folded wings of courting birds.

Sen 23374 The New York accent, with its Arabic swell, rolled over me like a warm, frothy wave, and I almost reached out to hug him.

Sen 26038 Here and there along the boulevard, frothy plumes, like gasps of effort, slapped up, over, and onto the white footpaths.

Sen 9639 The smells of rotis cooking on kerosene stoves, and chai boiling in fragrant pots joined the people-smells of coconut hair oil, sandalwood soap, and camphor-soaked clothing.

Sen 9661 We drank sweet tea spiced with clove, and ate waffle-style rotis filled with ghee and sugar, and rolled into tubes.

Sen 11570 We were exhausted, but hunger drove us to chew through the hot rotis and vegetables.

Sen 3103 The cherubs of that architectural sky were pigeons, so far overhead in their flutter from roost to roost that they were only faintly discernible; distant, celestial beings of flight, and white light.

Sen 11641 Aunt Penny was jealous of the girl’s beauty and her combative, intimidating intelligence—qualities not discernible in her own three children.

Sen 25407 I know now that assassin grief can hide for years and then strike suddenly, on the happiest day, without discernible reason or exegesis.

Sen 981 In fact, as he told me much later, Prabaker had just then decided to like me, and for him that meant he was bound to a scrupulous and literal honesty in everything he said or did.

Sen 4448 It was the kind of sadness that’s a companion, all too often, to scrupulous and uncompromising honesty.

Sen 20408 Nazeer, scrupulous as ever in his conformity with Khaderbhai’s instructions, never uttered a single word on the first leg from Bombay to Karachi.

Sen 11466 ORT, or Oral Rehydration Therapy, had been devised by Jon Rohde, a scientist who worked with local and UNICEF doctors in Bangladesh during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Sen 11467 The oral rehydration solution that he developed contained distilled water, sugar, common salt, and other minerals in carefully mixed proportions.

Sen 11493 My task was to supervise the use of the oral rehydration solution and to prepare batches of a homemade mixture as required.

Sen 11182 ‘That’s one of Karla’s lines,’ I retorted.

Sen 18987 ‘See my eviction from their point of view,’ Mehta retorted, with such vehemence that several heads turned toward him from other tables.

Sen 20600 ‘What socialists?’ he retorted, squinting more furiously.

Sen 22114 There was a small capstan lathe, which we’d bolted to a homemade table.

Sen 22115 The lathe ran on a diesel engine.

Sen 22158 I turned new parts on the turret lathe, and melted the helical metal shavings to make more parts.

Sen 7003 Both men had long hair, worn in dreadlocks as thick as two fingers, and tipped with coils of silver wire.

Sen 15440 His hair was matted in dreadlocks that reached to his waist.

Sen 27232 Their long dreadlocks and decorated plaits were concealed beneath turbans, and they wore plain white shirts and trousers.

Sen 2070 ‘For Christ’s sake, tell him to stop!’ I shouted as the cab accelerated into a squall of traffic, lurching in the swerve left and right.

Sen 10016 I realised that she was early drunk, in that squall of coherence before slurred speech and clumsiness and collapse.

Sen 15353 So much had happened since the last time I’d seen her, the first time we’d made love, that a fevered squall of emotion stung my eyes.

Sen 3982 The hot, pancake-like bread was filled with a dab of ghee, or purified butter, and a large spoonful of sugar.

Sen 9661 We drank sweet tea spiced with clove, and ate waffle-style rotis filled with ghee and sugar, and rolled into tubes.

Sen 23104 The flour had burned to soot with the rice and ghee and sugar.

Sen 5103 I had an extension cord with me, wrapped around my body under my coveralls.

Sen 5243 I took the chisel from the side-pocket of my coveralls.

Sen 5268 Telling him to hold still, I used the chisel to tear a flap in the pocket at the back of his coveralls.

Sen 9122 He sprawled in his place, where others sat.

Sen 10227 Hurriedly soaking a towel in cold water and grabbing up a large dish from the bathroom, I returned to find her sprawled out awkwardly, her hands on her belly.

Sen 12013 On the bed there was a young man sprawled with one leg over the foot of the bed.

Sen 4565 The faces of the Babas were radiant with their excruciation.

Sen 24081 Every movement of my body, or turn of the head, stabbed into that sweating excruciation.

Sen 21493 The latter was emphasised with spectacular effect by the antique, long-barrelled jezail that he held upright, balanced on his hip.

Sen 24017 They were Afghans, veteran fighters; hard men, with eyes that stared at me as if they were looking along the decorated barrel of a jezail rifle.

Sen 24151 ‘Do-do-teen hazaar,’ I answered, using the slang phrase two-two-three thousand, which always means three.

Sen 24152 ‘Teen hazaar!’ he huffed, more from habit than any real concern.

Sen 3452 There are plenty of arseholes and bastards around who will teach him the wrong sisterfucking words.

Sen 26748 Have you got a goat’s brain inside your sisterfucking head?’

Sen 5271 Wriggling like worms in the gutter of the trough, we moved forward to the castellated front wall of the prison.

Sen 18829 I sat beneath huge, fire-breathing dragons and ate Chinese broccoli with snow peas, garlic spinach, fried bean curd, and mushrooms in black bean sauce by the light of paper lanterns, while the windows gave a view of castellated battlements, gothic arches, and rosestudded topiary.

Sen 5522 In three minutes the chillum was prepared, and offered to Khaderbhai for the first dumm, or puff.

Sen 14626 Khader received the honour of lighting the pipe, and I took the second dumm.

Sen 4956 An hour later, she forced her husband and two other young men to drag me from the injured people to eat a meal of roti bread, rice, and bhajee.

Sen 7623 A team of women scooped out servings of saffron rice, alu palak, kheema, bhajee, and other foods.

Sen 10546 Later, while we drank hot and very sweet Suleimani chai in my hut, Abdullah explained that he’d been waiting for me in the hut, and heard the dogs.

Sen 16927 The servant brought sweet, black suleimani chai, in long glasses, and a variety of irresistible sweets on a silver tray.

Sen 10158 ‘They exiled him,’ she corrected grumpily.

Sen 24794 Didier had landed on me, and I heard him moaning grumpily.

Sen 18894 ‘We’ve got a moneychanger, yaar.

Sen 18910 He’s a licensed moneychanger.

Sen 2740 ‘But you still gave her buckets of grief when she wore it to the jazz yatra, na?’

Sen 24166 ‘He went on a journey, a yatra, and I don’t know when we’ll see him.’

Sen 11932 I explained my plan to Shantu on the way to the kholi settlement, adjacent to our slum.

Sen 11986 That face remained with me all the way back to the kholi settlement, but when we unloaded the boat, and Shantu agreed to join Vinod and me for dinner, I let the image of Rajan’s malice melt into my memory.

Sen 14108 ‘Riot nahin, morcha hain.’ It’s not a riot, it’s a demonstration.

Sen 14338 I saw a morcha, on my way up here.’

Sen 649 She turned and waved to him, then held out her hand to shake mine with a grip that was firm, but emotionally indeterminable.

Sen 19388 Thoughts drift like ocean weeds and vanish in the distant, grey somnolency, unperceived and indeterminable.

Sen 12368 Those foolish enough to enter were beaten and stripped naked by the fifty or sixty men who crushed into that black and foetid room.

Sen 12444 Make or break: I made my way in that world, right there and then, or I broke down, and let myself be forced into the foetid swamp at the end of the corridor.

Sen 547 But as Prabaker led me on through the roistering crowd, he drew my attention to other images of those beggars that softened the awful caricature presented by the performance of their piteousness.

Sen 27375 After too many long minutes of that brawling and roistering, we were near enough to Nariman Point to see the tower of the Oberoi Hotel.

Sen 16242 Some men appeared at the edge of the roofline on the train carriage.

Sen 16287 There was something stretched across the tracks, much higher than the roofline of the train.

Sen 13801 One of the moneychangers tells the cops, Hey, if you wanna know about Lin, go ask in the zhopadpatti, because he lives there.

Sen 15289 I found local moneychangers, drug dealers, tour guides, thieves, and gigolos at each of the beaches.

Sen 17610 She was beautiful: a California beach beauty in the carnal jungle of Bombay; a pom-pom girl who’d pulled her-self out of the death-by-leeches of heroin and the sybaritic suffocation of Madame Zhou’s Palace.

Sen 24169 One of the sybaritic splendours of Bombay is the limitless variety of relatively inexpensive, well-made clothes constantly changing to reflect the newest Indian and foreign trends.

Sen 15347 Mere kam, ki nahi…

Sen 27730 Malum nahi,’ the strong man replied.

Sen 376 The cement floor sloped downwards, with mysterious lumps and irregular undulations, toward the street windows.

Sen 7339 The bare earth floor was cracked, and formed in lumpy undulations.

Sen 9492 One of those fellows, he called our fellows the sisterfuckers.

Sen 12526 Until then, we smoke, and pray to the God, and bite any sisterfuckers who try to take our plates, na?’

Sen 19752 When at last I heard the sliding, scuffing sound of his chappals as he approached the door I smeared the sorrow from my face, and switched on the lamp.

Sen 27740 Their shoes or chappals must’ve been soled with soft rubber.

Sen 8437 He bent low to place a tray on the floor between us, and for a moment I stared into the lambent blackness of his eyes.

Sen 28601 Beings of such lambent compassion, such sublime equanimity, that in my broken, exiled heart I pledged to love them, as every man and woman who saw them did.

Sen 5696 It was a good laugh, guileless and completely unselfconscious, and I suddenly liked him because of it.

Sen 21258 Delighted and flushed with unselfconscious pride, he beamed one of his rare smiles at me.

Sen 24130 ‘Khaderbhai kahan hain?’ Where is Khaderbhai?

Sen 27228 ‘Kano-walleh kahan hey?’ I asked.

Sen 4744 To the right there were neon lights and floodlit fountains.

Sen 24502 A dozen steps led into the floodlit cellar.

Sen 4564 The Babas moved from man to man and group to group, preparing hashish in funnel-shaped clay chillums for the customers, and smoking with them.

Sen 4594 One of the Standing Babas approached us slowly with an acolyte who held a silver tray containing chillums, charras, and the paraphernalia of smoking.

Sen 12649 In any one night there were three to five bites; in a week, there were twenty; and, in a month, there were a hundred suppurating, infected sores on a man’s body.

Sen 12920 My body was covered in the small, suppurating sores caused by the bites of the nocturnal kadmal.

Sen 2347 I hesitated, but when the awkward star of his shuffling form melted in the darkness and vanished, I too put my feet out against the walls and shambled after him.

Sen 5382 Nevertheless, the round-up did mean days, weeks, or even months of confinement for the young men in prisons that were as bad as any in Asia, and the caravans of roped, arrested men that shambled throughout the city, after midnight, were more melancholy and forlorn than most funeral processions.

Sen 4745 To the left there was no electricity, no running water, no toilets, and no certainty that the whole shamble and bustle of it wouldn’t be swept away, from one day to the next, by the same authorities that reluctantly tolerated it.

Sen 11517 I was watching him shamble away down the lane toward the street, worrying about him, worrying about his young son, Satish, who was also ill, when I saw a woman in the distance walking toward me.

Sen 7790 It still rankled.

Sen 25344 The question still rankled six months later.

Sen 17593 For Lisa Carter, and others like her, the dream world of movies inspired an almost reverential awe.

Sen 22895 And because Suleiman’s commission had come directly from Massoud, the Lion of the Panjsher, the men gave him an equally reverential respect.

Sen 1379 Yet a peculiar dialectic applied to the relationships between upstairs and down, inside and outside the restaurant, and governed all of the business transacted there.

Sen 1382 Deals for drugs and other contraband were openly transacted at the tables, but the goods could only be exchanged outside the bar.

Sen 19194 It was torn apart by the fusillade.’

Sen 26022 ‘Get the fuck outta here!’ I spluttered, more shocked by his intention to marry than I was by his survival of the killing fusillade.

Sen 1357 Alone again, I sat down, set my chair against the wall, and let the activity of Leopold’s and its clamorous patrons close over me.

Sen 5738 We passed through a wide stone arch, along a corridor and, after climbing two flights of stairs, we entered a vast room filled with people, smoke, and clamorous music.

Sen 3917 The brothers of the murdered man stalked among them, giving encouragement and consolation while they castigated the backsliders for their cowardice.

Sen 4297 He castigated the men for shaming their own country and their own people by beating and robbing a foreigner, a visitor to their country who’d done them no harm.

Sen 13623 Every morning he visited the bagmen for each area, and handed over bundles of rupees for the street traders to use as their float.

Sen 13626 Bagmen did the rounds of traders throughout the day, supplying them with cash as they needed it.

Sen 9231 Kapok mattresses were available, but they were impractical.

Sen 19730 The room I chose had a cot with a kapok mattress, a weathered carpet, a small cabinet with wickerwork doors, a lamp with a silk lampshade, and a large clay matka filled with water.

Sen 6157 ‘Yes, yes,’ he answered testily.

Sen 10125 ‘Yeah, I know who you’re talking about,’ I said testily, irritated by the conversational non sequitur.

Sen 113 Then the smoulders of shame and guilt flamed into anger, became fist-tightening rage at the unfairness of it: What kind of a government, I thought, what kind of a system allows suffering like this?

Sen 7947 In the eyes of some, I saw smoulders of shame for what the council’s power had forced too many of us to think: Thank God … Thank God it’s not me …

Sen 9553 His expression—and I have no other way of describing the set of his features, other than as an expression—was disconsolate and profoundly distressed.

Sen 23140 And slowly, one ice-edged hour at a time, the knife of war whittled the wishing and hoping away until all that was left to us, within the hard, disconsolate wrap of our own arms around our own shivering bodies, was the lonely will to survive.

Sen 9725 He smiled, and raised one eyebrow quizzically, but he said nothing more, and I was forced to explain myself further.

Sen 20218 He raised one eyebrow quizzically.

Sen 4217 The woman then scowled dramatically left and right along the corridor before raising her blouse a few centimetres to reveal a long, thin, pendulous breast.

Sen 9808 His most striking feature was his nose, an instrument so huge and magnificently pendulous that is seemed designed for some purpose altogether more grand than merely inhaling air and fragrances.

Sen 3923 One of them, Raju, a tall boy with the handsome face and bouffant hairstyle of a Bombay movie star, had a gun.

Sen 25014 He was thirty years old, fit and heavy-set, with thick, dark-brown hair that he blow-dried to match the bouffant of the movie heroes.

Sen 10378 A diffident smile flickered on her lips.

Sen 18095 The point man for Maurizio’s operation in Bombay was the diffident, dour Spaniard, Sebastian Modena.

Sen 14355 ‘Drop me off, and keep the cab,’ he said, resting back against the seat and letting his face and body sag in a sigh of exhaustion or dejection.

Sen 22319 He was calm, but I knew him well enough to see the dejection that hooded his eyes.

Sen 15949 With clownish charm he held his open palms beside his smiling face one moment, and then pumped his groin back and forth with a determined little grimace the next.

Sen 20858 While I never managed to eliminate my clownish, arm-and-leg-flapping gestures when I made the animals stop or go or turn in a desired direction, I sometimes did succeed in dismounting them by climbing down rather than being hurled to the ground on my back.

Sen 16998 And by the time I swept into the last curve of coast near the Sea Rock Hotel, my mind was as clear as the broad horizon clamped upon the limit of a dark and tremulous sea.

Sen 26847 So Chandra Mehta smiled at me, and was glad to see me, and tried to pull me tighter into the tremulous clutch of his friendship whenever our paths crossed.

Sen 5531 The soul-wrenching strains of a romantic gazal slammed out at maximum volume from speakers behind our heads.

Sen 5792 ‘Urdu is the language of gazals, and these are the best gazal singers in all Bombay,’ he replied.

Sen 663 Her voice, in that language and in that conversation, was surprisingly deep and sonorous; the hairs on my arms tingled in response to the sound of it.

Sen 25454 He loved to laugh and tell stories, and his self-assured, sonorous voice compelled attention.

Sen 6306 Many of the men had a defiant and even a jaunty air about them—a kind of pugnacious ugliness that was fascinating in itself.

Sen 9804 The third was drawn by the desperate, pugnacious unhappiness of his mouth, the upside-down horseshoe of bad luck that fate had nailed to the doorpost of his life.

Sen 7006 His usual smile was preternaturally wide and his dark eyes were happy.

Sen 9426 It seemed preternaturally quiet: the haunted stillness of a popular bar, closed for business.

Sen 18963 It began with a white soup entree made with lamb cooked in blanched-almond milk, worked its way through grilled chicken in a cayenne, cumin, and mango marinade, and ended, after many other side platters, with fruit salad, honey kachori balls, and kulfi ice cream.

Sen 25010 We’d worked our way through a big but healthy lunch and kulfi dessert, and had moved on to our second coffee.

Sen 372 It was a large room, with three single beds covered by sheets, one window to the seaward side, and a row of windows that looked down upon a busy street.

Sen 7725 Smoke rose in drifts from cooking fires, and stuttered on a sluggish seaward breeze to disperse over a scattering of canoes that fished the muddy shore.

Sen 7794 Her tone was suddenly serious, portentous.

Sen 16987 As I rode the wind, a week after Khader’s little lecture on ethics, weaving the bike through ancient-modern traffic beneath a darkening, portentous tumble of clouds, those words echoed in my mind.

Sen 8348 Karla was young and attractive, sure, but most of the driver’s reaction was inspired by her fluency with his language, and the way she used it to deal with him.

Sen 20332 My fluency had forced him to communicate with me in Urdu most of the time.

Sen 12872 Sitting in circles of twelve or more men, and tapping on their upturned aluminium plates as if they were tabla drums, the prisoners sang love songs from their favourite movies.

Sen 20794 I watched the long, slender fingers of the tabla players clap and caress the trembling skins of the drums, and I felt my thoughts drift away from me in the hypnotic flutter and flow of the music.

Sen 21292 There were ten men walking, twenty men riding, fifteen packhorses, and a herd of ten goats.

Sen 21934 Siddiqi was strapped across one of the packhorses, as was the body of Madjid, the Afghan who’d been killed in the attack.

Sen 8114 I looked at the back of her head, at the small part of her profile, at the barely perceptible bump of her breasts beneath the green shawl, and the long, thin fingers making prayer in her lap, and I couldn’t imagine her living with someone.

Sen 9054 There was a perceptible sharpening of focus and attention in the few silent moments as Khaderbhai gathered his thoughts.

Sen 14057 Every squeeze of the spray was followed by a reflexive, polishing rub of his brass taxi driver’s identification badge, which he wore with swaggering pride.

Sen 22003 ‘For Christ’s sake!’ I sighed, with a last reflexive giggle of laughter.

Sen 7093 In its brawny grip, it seemed to me that I was floating, or perhaps falling, from some exalted place of inexpressible peace and promise.

Sen 7968 There was such sad tenderness in it that, for a second or two, I floated free, and was adrift in its inexpressible kindnesses.

Sen 25328 Lettie had once said that she found it strange and incongruous to hear me describe criminals, killers, and mafiosi as men of honour.

Sen 26924 And the clothes—I knew them well from the shopping expeditions that Sanjay Andrew, Faisal, and the other mafiosi made to the most expensive stores in the city.

Sen 1181 He shouted to one of the red-jacketed waiters, calling the man by the number ‘4’ emblazoned on the breast pocket on his uniform.

Sen 21442 Each time, Khader raised his green-and-white mujaheddin flag emblazoned with the Koranic phrase:

Sen 1197 ‘You would say that I think money is the best thing in the world,’ he suggested lazily, ‘and we’d both be right.

Sen 16684 He caught the eye of a waiter, and waved a hand lazily for another drink.

Sen 8777 He left the room, returned momentarily to place two bowls of ladoo and barfi sweets on the table, and then left us once more.

Sen 14619 Another grasped a plate bearing several sweet ladoo.

Sen 13 I worked as a gunrunner, a smuggler, and a counterfeiter.

Sen 24034 The temptation to talk about the American gunrunner who was wounded in battle, fighting with the mujaheddin, was irresistible.

Sen 4838 The smell of burning plastic, fuel, clothes, hair, and flesh was acrid and unnerving.

Sen 12397 The smoke given off was acrid and thick with a greasy soot that settled on everything it touched.

Sen 7615 It was a vast, cavernous space, divided by equidistant columns and canopied by a flat, concrete ceiling adorned with a creepery of cables.

Sen 21436 Habib laid out a route that was roughly equidistant between towns and larger villages, always avoiding the main arteries that local people used.

Sen 2269 The main road became streets and the streets became lanes and, when those proved too narrow for the taxi to negotiate, we left the vehicle and walked together in the sinuous busyness of the crowds.

Sen 16320 And I danced on that steel serpent as it slithered sinuous beside the scroll and swell of the endless, imperishable sea.

Sen 6357 Ranjit’s own eyes were honey-coloured, and clouded by what I judged to be incipient cataracts.

Sen 26972 His success with The Post, as it was known, had allowed Ranjit to segue into the incipient field of independent television production.

Sen 275 Prabaker shouted at his unruly colleagues, and they retreated a few paces, staring hungrily at our collection of bags and packs.

Sen 4224 ‘You know, Lin,’ Prabaker mumbled, gaping hungrily and almost fearfully at the drips of oil.

Sen 858 He took a sheaf of rupee notes from his shirt pocket, peeled off a number, and passed them across with his palm turned downward.

Sen 12930 When I managed, that morning, to scrounge a stub of pencil and a small sheaf of discarded sugar-ration wrappers, I felt ready at last to write down the lines of the first page.

Sen 11224 What characterises the human race more, Karla once asked me, cruelty, or the capacity to feel shame for it?

Sen 11225 I thought the question acutely clever then, when I first heard it, but I’m lonelier and wiser now, and I know it isn’t cruelty or shame that characterises the human race.

Sen 21584 And that face—I’d said, once, that I’d never seen another human face in which the smile was so utterly defeated—that scowl-creased face was transfigured in the dance until his honest, selfless beauty was so radiant that it filled my eyes with tears.

Sen 27336 Kano was not simply disguised—he was transfigured into the form of the elephant-headed god.

Sen 21083 Before we reached the town, however, we took a side road that seemed to end in a deserted track, with a stand of trees and several scrubby pastures, about thirty kilometres north of the main highway and the Chaman Pass.

Sen 21468 There were short, scrubby bushes with tiny yellow leaves that the goats enjoyed, and many varieties of wild grasses topped with feathery bowers of dried seed for the horses.

Sen 2962 A passing waiter took our last order, and moments later brought a banana lassi for Karla and a chai for me.

Sen 5633 Khaderbhai and I had ordered only mango-flavoured lassi.

Sen 1042 The fact that I trusted him on sight and didn’t haggle, on that first day, that I didn’t try to make a buck out of him, that I worked on an instinct that respected him and was prepared to like him, endeared me to him.

Sen 20561 It was a disarming expression, and it endeared him to me at once.

Sen 4617 A man dressed in the red turban, vest, and silk trousers of a northern tribesman stood there, near the iron gate, shrieking at the very top of a strong voice.

Sen 4636 At the last possible moment, a man stepped out from the wall at the side, tripped the goose-stepping tribesman, and sent him crashing to the stone floor.

Sen 13924 But even then, as I formed the clear thought to flee the city, I felt myself relaxing into a dense, fatalistic calm.

Sen 24902 And behind that almost spiritual awe there was a dull, throbbing, fatalistic dread.

Sen 20741 He laughed as he asked the question, and his tone was as honest and ingenuous as it ever was, but still the words stabbed into my mind.

Sen 26909 ‘That’s funny,’ I answered, not sure if he was as ingenuous as he seemed to be.

Sen 919 The taste was sharp and luscious—honeyed and subtly piquant at the same time.

Sen 21569 Those dishes included flavoured yoghurts, piquant goat’s or sheep’s milk cheeses, oven-baked cakes made with corn flour, dates, nuts, and wild honey, biscuits baked with richly churned goat’s milk butter and, of course, a variety of halal meats and vegetable pulao.

Sen 2642 Lettie wore a fine, bone-coloured brocade jacket over loose, dark-brown satin culottes, and boots.

Sen 17003 She wore a starched, sky-blue shirt with the collar turned up, and sky-blue culottes.

Sen 8759 He was dressed in the green pantaloons and long tunic of Afghan traditional dress.

Sen 19952 Khader was dressed in the loose pantaloons, shirt, and tunic-vest of the Pathans.

Sen 15773 There was nothing but the waves breaking like the curved spines of playful porpoises, and the traceless, empty, tousled sheets of sand.

Sen 24203 Her thick, dark brown hair was tousled and awry.

Sen 6370 He knelt to roll out the canvas, and revealed a collection of ampoules and plastic bottles.

Sen 23107 I scraped through the wreckage to retrieve some antibiotics, disinfectants, ointments, bandages, suture needles, thread, syringes, and morphine ampoules.

Sen 8038 The new part of the city was celebrating its thirtieth year, then, and Old Delhi its three hundredth.

Sen 25821 But it was Abdullah Taheri, his ghost, as handsome as Omar Sharif on his thirtieth birthday, as lethal as a big cat prowling, a black panther, and with those eyes the colour of sand in the palm of your hand a half-hour before sunset.

Sen 6908 Lamplights fluttered in the breeze, passing the golden gleam from eye to eye, as shadows chased one another across the reed-mat walls of the huts.

Sen 20836 I smiled into the golden eyes filled with tiny, swaying lamplights, and secrets, and sacred pleasures summoned by the singing.

Sen 2297 The buildings were cracked and smeared, the constricted passage-ways were crowded with goats, chickens, dogs, and people, and each thin face showed the shade and hollows of penury, but the streets and the people were stainlessly, scrupulously clean.

Sen 18093 The remnants of his family cast him out, no less for his penury than for the many scandals that had pursued his profligate progress through the Middle East and Asia.

Sen 27308 The elderly sculptor raised his grizzled brows when we entered his hut, but affected to ignore us and continued with the work of sanding and polishing a newly moulded section of a fibreglass religious frieze almost two metres in length.

Sen 27310 Wood and fibreglass shavings covered the table and lay in chips and whorls, along with rinds of papier-måché, at his bare feet.

Sen 2267 And with the seed of that resolve, born in that convulsion and portent, Prabaker’s dark circuit of the city began.

Sen 11385 She clutched at her belly and curled up in a ball, only to fling her arms and legs outward in a back-arching convulsion.

Sen 10468 The boy did so at once, clambering up piggyback style, and wrapping his thin arms around my neck tightly.

Sen 11330 Lin!’ my neighbour Jeetendra called out in a frightened shriek, and we turned to see him clambering over the rocks toward us.

Sen 12593 I was walking into the worst of the city, one of her cruellest and most iniquitous defiles, but some instinct flooded my mind with a loveliness I’d found in her—that path, across the sea, to the white minarets of the saint’s tomb.

Sen 13229 I was dying of hunger, and I was learning that it’s one of the cruellest ways to kill a man.

Sen 1505 When he wasn’t smiling his face looked flabby, slack, and pallid grey.

Sen 18245 His skin was pallid, matt, and in some places marbled-grey.

Sen 13899 Using the temple complex as a base, the militants had launched punitive attacks against Hindus, and those they described as recalcitrant Sikhs, for many weeks.

Sen 26088 Indeed, Salman’s mafia clan found itself in the unique position of bribing the police—the same cops who’d just been paid off by pimps and pushers—to look away whenever they had to run a recalcitrant heroin dealer into a brick wall, or take a mash hammer to a pornographer’s hands.

Sen 6128 Abdullah kicked the engine over, and I climbed up onto the pillion seat behind him.

Sen 24394 DIDIER LEVY was the worst pillion passenger I’ve ever known.

Sen 24139 ‘Hum akela hain,’ I replied, returning his smile.

Sen 24142 ‘Akela …’ he repeated.

Sen 8777 He left the room, returned momentarily to place two bowls of ladoo and barfi sweets on the table, and then left us once more.

Sen 8995 He snatched a chunk of sweet barfi from the plate on the table, bit a piece of it, and munched happily.

Sen 17790 The signal changed and I kicked the bike into gear, twisting the throttle to send us into the intersection on the staccato throbbing of the engine’s growl.

Sen 21315 As the sound rose in its pitch and intensity, the two horses reared in the same instinct, and stamped their hooves in staccato fear.

Sen 19076 Encouraged by that febrile curiosity, Cliff De Souza spun out yarns about the Bollywood stars, and Chandra Mehta added titillating ruffles of gossip throughout.

Sen 21403 ‘I’m worried,’ Khaled confessed, looking into my eyes with a febrile mix of heartbreak and fear.

Sen 134 What had seemed unimaginably strange and remote from my experience suddenly became possible, and comprehensible, and, finally, fascinating.

Sen 3267 When I understood that, a great many of the characteristically perplexing aspects of public life became comprehensible: from the acceptance of sprawling slums by city authorities, to the freedom that cows had to roam at random in the midst of traffic; from the toleration of beggars on the streets, to the concatenate complexity of the bureaucracies; and from the gorgeous, unashamed escapism of Bollywood movies, to the accommodation of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Tibet, Iran, Afghanistan, Africa, and Bangladesh, in a country that was already too crowded with sorrows and needs of its own.

Sen 1574 He paused, drumming the fingers of his right hand on the cold marble tabletop.

Sen 25324 Where the footpath was clogged with shoppers halting at the tabletop street stalls, we walked on the road with a slow, unceasing stream of traffic behind and beside us.

Sen 7566 The uppermost floors hadn’t been concreted, but the framework of upright, transom, and truss girders was already in place and even there, thirty-five storeys into the sky, women worked beside the men.

Sen 15787 On the opposite long wall of the room, four tall windows looked upon the uppermost branches and cool, shading leaves of plane trees lining the street below.

Sen 10162 Lisa stirred her head from the pillows suddenly, her movements groggy, and glared at me with what seemed to be real malevolence.

Sen 11985 His face was a gargoyle mask of malevolence and hatred.

Sen 3583 Responding to the violent blow, the ox gave a lurch forward, and then set off with ponderous, thudding slowness.

Sen 6417 When Abdullah finished speaking, there was a dense and ponderous silence.

Sen 6963 The bear turned, ponderously slow, but then lashed out swiftly and swept a massive paw at the dogs.

Sen 19158 We hurtled through the ponderously slow traffic, riding on luck and instinct just as Abdullah might’ve done.

Sen 229 The impression was of a plodding, indefatigable, and distant past that had crashed intact, through barriers of time, into its own future.

Sen 3186 Astonished, and not a little ashamed, I clung to the porter as he hammered his way into the carriage with his indefatigable and irresistible knees.

Sen 4292 I tried to stand near him and protect him with my legs, but I tripped and fell clumsily.

Sen 10166 She pulled the silk jacket open until she was quite naked, touching at her breasts clumsily.

Sen 3727 A desperate expression contorted his normally happy features.

Sen 9556 I turned to ask him a question, and found that he was crying, his face contorted with miserable sobbing.

Sen 4223 A thick dribble of coconut oil gathered before her fingers, and dripped from the end of the plait onto the threadbare carpet.

Sen 7336 As my gaze followed hers, I saw my little house for the shabby, threadbare hovel that it really was.

Sen 7665 ‘Nobody knows who he is, Lin,’ Kishore said, his American-accented English, learned from tourists, flowing in a liquid drawl.

Sen 27500 ‘Chuha and his buddies,’ Amir answered in his lazy drawl.

Sen 4402 Moreover, I was already an overstayer on my visa, and technically guilty of a criminal offence.

Sen 28237 He’s an overstayer.

Sen 11047 We laughed again, and Prabaker slapped at his thigh, hooting with such hilarity that every head turned toward him.

Sen 12537 That might’ve gone on indefinitely, judging by the hilarity it provoked in the gallery of surrounding guards, but I refused to play.

Sen 12818 You just squeeze the little fucks between your thumbnails, like this.’

Sen 12821 There were scores of the lice, and he squashed each one expertly between his thumbnails.

Sen 21266 The saying, pride goeth … before a fall … is condensed from the second collection of the Book of Proverbs, 16:18—Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.

Sen 21266 The saying, pride goeth … before a fall … is condensed from the second collection of the Book of Proverbs, 16:18—Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.

Sen 3607 The rhythm of those heavy blows was punctuated by sharp jabs at the animal’s flanks with the nail attached to the end of the stick.

Sen 15286 In exchange, the Bullet provided the kind of soaring, celestial, wind-weaving pleasure that birds must know, punctuated by not infrequent near-death experiences.

Sen 1152 I felt myself reddening slightly, not from embarrassment, but from shame, that she’d said so easily the very words, I like you, that I wouldn’t let myself say to her.

Sen 18535 ‘He’s well,’ I replied, reddening a little with shame that I didn’t see the good and noble head man as often as I used to, when I’d lived in the slum.

Sen 3199 His feet were wrapped around the aisle armrest.

Sen 3200 His hands clasped the armrest at the window end.

Sen 7193 With subtractions for the space taken up by animal pens, shops, storage areas, streets, lanes, and latrines, that allowed some two square metres for each man, woman, and child among us.

Sen 15496 While seemingly immune to decay, the saint’s body had suffered various amputations and subtractions over the centuries.

Sen 1985 His piteously thin mantis-legs were folded and tucked beneath him on the platform, which was a piece of wood no bigger than a folded newspaper.

Sen 11771 The procession of children that ran with us behind the biers carrying those little bodies, garlanded with flowers, wailed their grief so piteously that many strangers on the busy streets paused in prayer, and felt the sudden burn and sting of tears.

Sen 20959 In the lengthening silence I looked at the lean, sinewed face and I controlled even the sound of my breathing, lest it disturb him.

Sen 23649 But it wasn’t Habib’s knife that we stared at, jutting out of the muddy, sinewed throat like a branch from a riverbed.

Sen 21300 What had seemed to be smooth walls of bare, mountainous rock proved on closer inspection to be formed in undulating waves of ravines and tiered crevices.

Sen 21470 The impact of those tender, viridescent carpets between the endlessly undulating crocodile’s back of naked stone mountains was far greater than it might’ve been in a more fertile and equable landscape.

Sen 8440 I was mesmerised by it, bewildered, and strangely ashamed.

Sen 24043 So mesmerised were they by his savage hatred, and so obsessed were they with his capture, that they failed to detect the stealthy advance of Ahmed Shah Massoud’s forces.

Sen 22853 When Nazeer was sufficiently recovered, he insisted on burying Abdel Khader Khan with the strictest adherence to ritual.

Sen 23281 They prayed every day, but not in strict adherence to the timetable of three sessions, ordained by Shia Islam, or the five sessions of the Sunni Muslims.

Sen 3855 When I learned to speak her language well enough, she told me with disarming candour how disappointed she’d been when she’d scrutinised Kishan for the first time.

Sen 20558 We shook hands, sizing one another up with equal candour and affability.

Sen 2396 They were huge hands, gnarled and calloused enough to scrape the barnacles off the side of a dry-docked oil tanker.

Sen 5911 With a curt but respectful nod to Khader, he began to mull tobacco and hashish in his gnarled hands.

Sen 19834 I saw Gupta-ji’s lips pout and his eyes squint in a wince, and then his face exploded in a shower of sparks that left the world darker than a cave full of sleeping bats.

Sen 27399 I felt the wince of guilt that litter-conscious westerners invariably experience, and reminded myself that the mess on the road would be collected by rag-pickers who depended on the litter for their livelihood.

Sen 6305 I don’t know why—the price, perhaps, that women pay for their loveliness—but the disfigurements seemed more ghastly for the women than they were for the men.

Sen 22830 In some ways, he resembled Ranjit’s lepers, but his wounds were so raw and bloody, and the teeth were so smashed, that Ranjit’s disfigurements seemed benign in comparison.

Sen 25453 Amir was a scarred, blunt-headed man with thick, tangled eyebrows and a moustache that rode the cresting wave of his full upper lip like the wide prow of a Kashmiri houseboat.

Sen 28090 Only the prow and a few metres of the long boat’s gunnels protruded from the surrounding waves of sand.

Sen 3789 After the shower, and a delicious meal of dhal, rice, and homemade flatbreads, Prabaker and I watched as his parents and his two sisters opened their presents.

Sen 3981 The roti, or unleavened flatbreads, were made fresh for each breakfast, and cooked in a lightly oiled wok on an open fire.

Sen 21466 The steep mountain slopes of the country were barren, burned of life by biting wintry winds, but every flat plain, no matter how small, was a vivid, living green.

Sen 22174 There were dark, thick clouds massed to the east of us, and the cold air was damp with the rain and snow they would bring, but for the moment we could see all the way to the end of the world, and our wintry eyes were drowning in the beauty of it.

Sen 3142 From the broiling tangle of bodies, one man emerged and walked towards us.

Sen 5408 I allowed my life to be swept up in the broiling, dancing struggle of their twenty-five thousand lives.

Sen 7708 The women reacted with shocked scepticism, chattering amongst themselves.

Sen 28458 Although I’d tried to hide it, I knew she’d picked up the scepticism barbed with righteous censure in my tone.

Sen 15016 He kicked the bike into gear, and roared off into the meandering traffic.

Sen 26782 So I moved between the frantic flow of cars, bikes, buses, trucks, and push-carts, and the meandering progress of tourists and shoppers, and let my thoughts drift into the heat and the street.

Sen 875 ‘Oh, yes!’ Prabaker enthused.

Sen 14657 He was enjoying himself in the discussion, and I realised that I’d never seen him quite so animated or enthused.

Sen 10739 I loved those kilometres from Chor bazaar, past Crawford Market, V.T.

Sen 12349 Their room was known as the chor mahal, the abode of thieves, and the men were known as the black hats, the kala topis—like Ranjit’s lepers—because convicted thieves at the infamous Arthur Road Prison were forced to wear a black hat with their prison uniform.

Sen 1170 ‘They’re wrong,’ she said with terse finality.

Sen 8109 I did want to know, but she turned her face away to stare out the window, and there was a finality in the gesture that warned and prohibited.

Sen 26901 ‘And it’s a pleasure to meet you,’ he countered, with the well-rounded and musical inflection of Bombay’s best private schools and universities: my favourite accent in all the beautiful ways to speak the English language.

Sen 26905 In that context and with that inflection it meant Oh, yeah?

Sen 17474 The city was full of mercenaries, fugitives, criminals, black-market profiteers, and wild-eyed, bare-knuckled opportunists from all over Africa.

Sen 20476 But with a little luck and skilful connivance, the profiteers hoped, the army might remain in control of the country—and the well-established channels of corruption—for some years yet.

Sen 2741 ‘Well, how was I to know that she would want to wear it outside the apartment?’ he countered lamely, provoking laughter and derision from the whole group.

Sen 3210 It was fully equal, his glaring eyes left no doubt, to the derision he felt for me.

Sen 2297 The buildings were cracked and smeared, the constricted passage-ways were crowded with goats, chickens, dogs, and people, and each thin face showed the shade and hollows of penury, but the streets and the people were stainlessly, scrupulously clean.

Sen 3301 And I learned more, during those fourteen constricted and largely silent hours in the crowded economy-class section, communicating without language, than I could’ve learned in a month of travelling first class.

Sen 5307 I clambered over the bluestone parapet, and took hold of the cord.

Sen 11952 The hotel was built upon a tall platform of bluestone and granite blocks, with ten marble steps leading up to each wide entrance.

Sen 3272 Every available centimetre of seating space was occupied, even to the sturdy metal luggage racks over our heads.

Sen 10864 I glanced at his torn, bloody shirt, and at the cuts and bruises that were swelling on his face and every exposed centimetre of flesh.

Sen 1362 For many, the duplication of their own images in two or more mirrors at the same time was not least among the pleasures of the pastime.

Sen 20637 Side streets and lateral avenues revealed that the duplication of those crude, resemblant structures extended all the way to the horizon of sight, on either side of the main road.

Sen 3920 Exhilarated and afraid, they were at the point of striking when they realised that the men were allies.

Sen 4584 She was exhilarated, and perhaps a little unnerved.

Sen 1373 Its intricate tile-work replicated the pattern used in a north Indian palace, with hexagons in black, cream, and brown radiating from a central sunburst.

Sen 21819 There was a sunburst of gold around the pupils of his eyes that seemed to pulse and whirl.

Sen 117 I began to look beyond the immensity of the slum societies, and to see the people who lived within them.

Sen 7557 We’d reached the perimeter of the legal slum, and the megalithic immensity of the twin skyscrapers loomed before us.

Sen 4821 Stunned, afraid, but not in panic, I watched the inexorable advance of the inferno, and decided that the cause was lost.

Sen 25385 Somehow, Salman’s casual remark that we all blamed ourselves for not being with Khader when he died had shaken my frozen sorrowing free, and the slow, inexorable snowslip of its heartache began, right there and then.

Sen 24533 The walls and fences on either side of the lane were made of stone, brick, and cement, patched together over many decades, and swarming with a wormy writhe of plants, mosses, and creepers.

Sen 27186 But they hadn’t lived in those miraculous acres, and they hadn’t learned that to survive in such a writhe of hope and sorrow the people had to be scrupulously and heartbreakingly honest.

Sen 9044 Sobhan Mahmoud wagged his head in assent, his gleaming eyes nesting under a tufted ledge of grey eyebrows.

Sen 27306 Finally, Joseph smiled and gave his assent.

Sen 1287 And writing was one of the things that saved me: the discipline and abstraction of putting my life into words, every day, helped me to cope with shame and its first cousin, despair.

Sen 26512 He made the little speech so calmly, and then sipped at his tea with such contented abstraction, that it exaggerated the weirdness of his delusion.

Sen 22460 ‘And the help you gave me with the clinic?’ I asked, feeling sick, and knowing that if I unlocked my knees and let my legs relax, they would crumple and fold beneath me.

Sen 24288 Didier’s collapse was the work of seconds, and I was watching him crumple and fade from one heartbeat to the next.

Sen 543 Trash tumbled from the windows above without warning, and garbage was heaped in piles on the pavement or the roadway, where fat, fearless rats slithered to feast.

Sen 6126 Abdullah’s motorcycle was parked on the roadway, outside the slum, where several kids were watching over it.

Sen 9442 There was a metal gate made from hinged, concertina-style lattices behind him.

Sen 9475 Prabaker asked them to explain what they wanted, and the two blue-skinned men shouted their story, clutching at the lattices of the gate as if they were the boards of a raft on the open sea.

Sen 7705 ‘Her eyes are the colour of stink-weed,’ said the first with a contemptuous sniff.

Sen 9565 The watchman wrinkled his lips in a pitying and contemptuous sneer.

Sen 9044 Sobhan Mahmoud wagged his head in assent, his gleaming eyes nesting under a tufted ledge of grey eyebrows.

Sen 21471 We responded to each new sight of a softly carpeted incline or tufted, leafy moor with similar pleasure—a deep, subliminal response to the vitality in the colour green.

Sen 19898 Nazeer waited for her there, his thick arms jutting out from the swollen trunk of his body.

Sen 23649 But it wasn’t Habib’s knife that we stared at, jutting out of the muddy, sinewed throat like a branch from a riverbed.

Sen 2349 One foot strayed from the edge of the wall, and my boot squelched into a muddy slime that rested in the centre of the path.

Sen 21759 My hand squelched in a bloody wound.

Sen 4207 He was a full head and shoulder shorter than she was, and he returned her baleful stare with the fixity of a school bully’s minor henchman.

Sen 4765 They were all staring at me with such gravity, such a fixity of frowning intensity, that I felt sure they must bear me enormous ill-will.

Sen 5051 A stool found its way into my hut, and a water pot—the ubiquitous matka—and a set of saucepans, and a few pieces of cutlery.

Sen 9650 Carried back and hoisted through the wire, the water had to be boiled in saucepans on small kerosene stoves, at some cost of the relatively expensive fuel.

Sen 5926 The musicians accompanying the singers on the harmonium and the tablas were animated, but the singers themselves were expressionless, motionless, with their eyes closed and their hands limp.

Sen 20793 The Blind Singers cleared their throats noisily, and the assembly of musicians began the introduction to a new song with the plaintive wail of the harmonium and the blood-stirring passion of the tablas.

Sen 1065 I liked the Helvetian music of her Swiss-American English, and the way she pushed her hair back slowly with a thumb and forefinger when she was irritated by something.

Sen 8946 He scratched at his bushy eyebrows with thumb and forefinger, and then plunged into the discussion with the confident air of a man much used to expressing his opinions.

Sen 817 It was a diminutive I never could’ve invented for myself.

Sen 5626 The affectionate diminutive of the name Ramesh, Ramu, provoked a wide, child’s smile on the young face.

Sen 1817 I found it amazing that such a feral, emaciated creature should permit itself to be petted by a stranger, and that Karla would want to do such a thing.

Sen 13713 And despite their shock and sorrow when they saw my emaciated frame, and the scars that the overseers had branded on my skin, they never once mentioned the prison.

Sen 4522 I found myself thinking of her apartment, of her ground-floor windows, those tall French doors that looked out on the cobbled lane, not five minutes away from my hotel.

Sen 26423 They slept in shifts, in a loft space they’d built above the cobbled lane and between the walls of adjacent buildings.

Sen 17434 Some had overstayed their visas, and that lapse had to be expunged from the book before it could be used.

Sen 24099 According to the entries in the book, I’d overstayed on my visa.

Sen 7562 Snaking lines of sari-clad women carrying dishes of gravel on their heads wove through all the workplaces, from man-made dunes of small stones to the yawning mouths of ceaselessly revolving cement-mixing machines.

Sen 25583 On the street below us, parading tourists wove coloured garlands with their movements through and around the tall, stony gallery of the Gateway Monument.

Sen 1576 ‘That is one of mine,’ he said, apparently peeved that I hadn’t drawn attention to the phrase.

Sen 16758 He pouted for a few moments, too peeved to proceed, but then raised his eyes to meet mine and laughed out loud.

Sen 8367 There was an alleyway on the right-hand side of the building, and the stonemasons had lavished their handiwork on the quoin—every second stone from the ground to below the eaves was faceted like a jewel.

Sen 24639 I was leaning out backwards, looking up under blue sky at the crazed servant and the eaves of the house behind his head.

Sen 17584 When I needed foreigners to fill bit parts in the Bollywood films, I trawled those cafes and restaurants.

Sen 26089 Old men in the district nodded to one another, and compared the relative calm on their streets with the chaos that tumbled and trawled through the streets of other districts.

Sen 1984 He pushed himself forward with his hands until he reached the centre of the deserted road, wheeling to a stop with a dramatic pirouette.

Sen 1995 With another swift, show-off’s pirouette, he propelled himself forward along the road, gaining speed as he rolled down the gentle slope to the Gateway Monument.

Sen 6732 They talked quietly while the sun rose to its zenith, and the sweltering humidity of the day clamped a moist grip on us all.

Sen 16316 My city was a steaming, sweltering hothouse garden of dreaming.

Sen 21303 In places they were so jagged and narrow that every footstep of horse or man was brooded over with careful, trembling consideration before it was made.

Sen 22052 We heard a sound, a footstep, behind us.

Sen 25462 During the four years since his release, Faisal had worked as Amir’s principal strong-arm man in the burgeoning protection racket.

Sen 26808 While the commitment had exhausted their savings and forced them to borrow from Vikram’s parents, it was proof of their faith in one another and the future of their burgeoning movie business, and they were still excited with the change.

Sen 18028 She was dressed in a pullover and jeans, an outfit that only a Bombay native could wear on such a humid, still, and hot night.

Sen 18943 Lisa wore a thin, lava-red pullover beneath a black silk jacket, and a skirt.

Sen 4854 Wilful gusts of wind drove the arc forward in probing feints, flaring up suddenly on one side, and then blazing toward us from a different direction.

Sen 10466 The wild howling goaded the most maddened of them to make a series of rushing feints from several directions.

Sen 10486 The large black dog that seemed to be the pack leader made a cunning double feint.

Sen 27744 The feint had its effect.

Sen 2489 All of them stared out at the well-fed, well-clothed purchasers and agents, following every change of expression or emphatic gesture of their bejewelled hands.

Sen 11778 Competition in Colaba for the tourist dollar was cordial, but creatively emphatic.

Sen 9887 He turned without looking at the boy, and strode off into the shadowed arches.

Sen 16064 I strode on through familiar streets, and told myself that it was okay.

Sen 11869 His moustache was fastidiously snipped and trimmed to little more than the thickness that a felt-tipped pen might’ve made.

Sen 17358 Although foreigners had to show their passports for C-Form entries when they registered at hotels, every city had its share of places that weren’t fastidiously precise about the resemblance, or lack of it, between a passport and its bearer.

Sen 684 What I found bewildering, all around me, seemed to be mundane for her.

Sen 2260 But for me that sudden, savage, bewildering riot, the sight of that taxi-driver floating away on a rippling wave of hands, shoulders, and heads was a turning point.

Sen 3526 The dhoti is technically described as a loincloth, but the term robs the garment of its serene and graceful elegance.

Sen 15439 Tall, lean, and tanned to a dark, earthbrown, he wore a loincloth and was adorned with dozens of necklaces, amulets, and decorative bracelets.

Sen 7158 With only days to go before the big rain, many itinerants and entertainers, like the two bear-handlers, had sought shelter in slums throughout the city.

Sen 7187 Along with those itinerants, many of the people who lived on the streets near our slum were drawn to the relative security of our huts.

Sen 14712 If we have no commonly agreed criterion for measuring length, we will never agree about how much land is yours, and how much is mine, or how to cut lengths of wood when we build a house.

Sen 14733 They wanted an unchanging criterion against which to measure all other things.

Sen 4581 Conversations, buzzing softly, blended with music and devotional chanting, coming from somewhere inside the compound.

Sen 27371 Seeing our little procession as an opportunity to practise their music on the march, they swung in behind us and struck up a rousing, if not particularly canorous, version of a popular devotional song.

Sen 4898 When one squalling downdraft of wind swept black and brown smoke into our clearing, we lost sight of Qasim Ali Hussein completely.

Sen 20492 Vexed and gloomy with squalling emotions I entered the Faloodah House in the Bohri bazaar, and ordered one of the sweet, technicoloured drinks.

Sen 860 He finished talking, at last, and beckoned me forward.

Sen 27333 At last, Rakeshbaba pulled aside the reed curtains and beckoned us to enter his workshop.

Sen 3192 The word he was repeating with such distress was unrecognisable to me because I wasn’t used to being addressed by it: Sir.

Sen 25974 Everyone said you were shot so many times that your face was unrecognisable.’

Sen 3267 When I understood that, a great many of the characteristically perplexing aspects of public life became comprehensible: from the acceptance of sprawling slums by city authorities, to the freedom that cows had to roam at random in the midst of traffic; from the toleration of beggars on the streets, to the concatenate complexity of the bureaucracies; and from the gorgeous, unashamed escapism of Bollywood movies, to the accommodation of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Tibet, Iran, Afghanistan, Africa, and Bangladesh, in a country that was already too crowded with sorrows and needs of its own.

Sen 8602 He stared that perplexing malice into my eyes once more, and then closed the door.

Sen 4011 The grandparents were plump, but not fat, the parents were bright-eyed and fit, and the children were straight-limbed, clever, and vivacious.

Sen 18390 On their first visit they found Lisa Carter, Kalpana, Kavita, and Lettie, with three German girls who’d worked for Lisa as extras on a film —seven beautiful, intelligent, vivacious young women.

Sen 13052 I swallowed quickly, gulping and spluttering.

Sen 24792 Spluttering and coughing in the cloud of charcoal dust and floating fibres, I wriggled against my fallen friend to sit upright.

Sen 3787 Within the encircling lungi, I removed and discarded my wet shorts and slipped on a dry pair of shorts underneath.

Sen 11785 Exiles from Afghanistan sold huge, ornamental silver rings engraved with the Pashto script and encircling amethysts the size of pigeons’ eggs.

Sen 7464 The tradesmen, artisans, and labourers who built the towers were housed in hutments, tiny slum-dwellings, on land adjacent to the site.

Sen 7466 Many of the tradesmen were itinerant workers who followed where their skills were needed, and whose real homes were hundreds of kilometres away in other states.